| Hi Toerless Thanks for your note. As this is primarily an LLC issue, I will pick it up. Throughout the run up to this meeting (and all meetings) we have been in contact with multiple people who have visa issues and we use whatever levers we have with the government of the host country to support those visa applications. The issue we have seen this time around is primarily people not having their visa application be completed in time, despite them applying far in advance of the recommended timing. We have been putting significant effort into this with direct communication with the Canadian government, but by necessity that is all behind the scenes. We normally know the full numbers of people who were unable to get visas as we refund the difference between their onsite registration and the remote fee, but for this meeting we have the added complication of multiple people who were unable to get here due to travel difficulties associated with the Crowdstrike outage. As a result, we have reached out directly to a number of organisations to get numbers for those affected and we will follow up on that in the post-meeting survey. Also, after this meeting, we will continue to engage with the Canadian government to try to prevent this happening for future meetings. However, and this is a big however, government 'policies' can change very quickly and we have very limited influence over that. Things could be entirely different for our next meeting here, despite any effort we put into it, for reasons entirely outside of our control. Ultimately, both the US and Canada have demonstrated significant problems for us around visas, though different problems, and so long as we are required to meeting in North America, the best we can do is rotate between those two. For us to issue letters of invitation we need to ensure that we only do so for people who genuinely need them for an IETF meeting. If we don’t and we allow our letters of invitation to be misused, then they will simply be disregarded and we may put ourselves at legal risk. The best way for us to ensure this, is to only issue letters to people who have paid for their registration, but in order to bring this forward we have had to put significant work into the meeting registration system to allow us to have registration open for two meeting at once. This is now complete and we should be switching that on later this year. Of course, that also means that we need to bring forward our work to identify a local host who can provide the letter of invitation in those countries that require a local signatory. We are also examining if we can offer letters of invitation to people who have a good track record of onsite participation even before registration opens for a meeting. So far, we have worked with some larger organisations that send multiple participants to test this, with a view to automating that somehow. I think that covers everything, but please let me know if you have any further questions. Jay
-- Jay Daley IETF Executive Director exec-director@xxxxxxxx
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