Thanks for the detailled reply - and process you have in place now, Jay/LLC
As mentioned in the hallway, i would suggest to IETF/LLC to figure out a
useful summarized way to make concerns about a mtgvenue/countries past experience
public with intent purpose to provide helpful summaries for those on the
policy side in the countries that could help to provide improvements.
Something like an IETF weg page with other useeful summary about past IETF
in-person meetings, and then include maybe some green...yellow..red evaluation of ease of
attendance wrt. to actually experiend immigration policies.
I have seen in the past public complaints seen to actually help, even if
just limited.
Of course, everybody's mileage of the helpfullness of such publicity will
vary, and you're doing this as your day job, and i only a bystander,
so use any advice with caution ;-))
Cheer
Toerless
On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 10:24:37AM -0700, Jay Daley wrote:
> 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
>
> > On 24 Jul 2024, at 09:31, Toerless Eckert <tte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Dear LLC/IESG:
> >
> > Given how i may unfortunately not be able to raise the questions tonight at the plenary, i wanted
> > to ask them here to the IESG/LLC and Cc the relevant lists:
> >
> > 1. Question: How many people did register for IETF120 and requested an invitation letter,
> > but did not check-in onsite. The final count of course would be on friday
> > if someone actualy only wanted to go to IETF for one day, but the data for today would
> > likely be a good indicator.
> >
> > Yes, not all of these people may have failed to attend IETF120 in person because of
> > Visa issues, but it seems like a good first estimate and most likely reason, unless
> > more analysis is done.
> >
> > 2. Could IETF/LLC please do have a questionaire to primarily those people, but of course
> > if desired also everybody else to better understand the causes for not attending, especially
> > because those reasons that we could impact by our future processes.
> >
> > - A Visa was not approved even though the application was sent to the authorities
> > before the publically known required timeline (i was told that that timeline was about 50 days).
> > ... rejected ? / no final answer received... ?
> >
> > - A Visa was requested too late
> >
> > - ... other reasons.. what could they be...
> >
> > Reaching out to more people than just those that actually did get an invitation letter
> > would also be important because there may be reasons that did prohibit those people to
> > sufficiently well in ahead pay for IETF registration to get the invitation letter to be
> > able to request the Visa - or people who where just surprised to learn how long it would
> > take - and gave up before requesting an invitation letter.
> >
> > aka: those type of questions should ideally be raised in the questionaire as well.
> >
> > 3. With that data available, i hope we would be able to discuss better possible
> > conclusions of how we could avoid less Visa rejections in the future
> >
> > - Providing invitation letters to start Visa applications earlier
> > - Reconsider future MTGvenues (such as hopefully not Montreal in Canada in 2025, but worst
> > case that question might need to come up if the above idata does show that there
> > is sufficient unpredictability or even rejections of Visa from Canada.
> >
> > Thanks you so much
> >
> > Cheers
> > Toerless
>
> --
> Jay Daley
> IETF Executive Director
> exec-director@xxxxxxxx
>
--
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tte@xxxxxxxxx
