--On Sunday, 22 September, 2024 10:01 +0200 Vittorio Bertola
<vittorio.bertola=40open-xchange.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Il 22/09/2024 04:51 CEST George Michaelson <ggm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> ha scritto:
>>
>>
>> Flight cost for most of Asia to Beijing is probably 1/2 to
>> 1/3 of Australia. Plus, masses of Chinese will come.
>>
>> I would expect Beijing to have less core 5+ ietf attendees
>> and more newcomers and to probably break even.
>>
>> No disagreement with much of what you say but I think
>> assuming it will be like Brisbane is a mistake.
>>
> In the end, we all know what the conditions in China are, and
> that most regulars from North America and many from Europe
> wouldn't attend in person, but there would be a lot of Chinese
> newcomers and this meeting would support the second biggest
> IETF community by country. Whether we want to have such a
> meeting is a "political" decision (you can remove the quotes
> if you like) to be taken by weighing the pros and cons.
> Among the pros, I see the fact that this meeting would counter
> the claims by non-Western-bloc governments that the Internet
> is currently controlled by the West and biased in its favour,
> and that its governance, and maybe its architecture, have to
> change to accommodate the rest of the world, at least if the
> claim that "there is a single global Internet" should stand. I
> think this could be worth sacrificing some participation. But
> again, I am an engineer that moved to the dark side and
> started doing policy a long time ago, so YMMV.
One small bit of calibration (or maybe disagreement). We often
lump two groups together under the "newcomers" label. One group
consists of people who interested in the IETF's substantive
technical work and who are reasonably likely to become active
contributors in the future. The other group is characterized by
people who would be interested in attending a meeting to learn a
bit about what the IETF does and/or how works, but for whom the
odds turning into of long-term, substantive (and probably
technical) contributions in the future are very low.
If we say "lots of newcomers", it should be clear which group we
are talking about because, whether we want to retain the first
group or educate the second, our orientation, "guide" program,
and other support arrangements should be quite different in
order to be successful. We should also note ISOC's program to
identify potentially significant members of the second group and
bring them to the IETF, rather than bringing the IETF to them
--including understanding what was successful about it and what
aspects deteriorated, e.g., into a "come to the zoo and see the
geeks in action and at play" effort.
Just my personal opinion as someone who arguably started closer
to the policy side but was then drawn increasingly into
technical work, but, if we think in person attendance by active
participants makes the IETF more effective in its work, then
sacrificing that kind of attendance to get more "newcomers" of
the second group is not a good tradeoff. In addition, drawing
from both the experience of the last Beijing meeting and Ole's
and John Levine's comments, the first-time people we see may be
sufficiently vetted by the government to be sure they won't be
the source of what the government considers trouble that the
first-time attendance figures might not be as high as some are
predicting.
I would, of course, by happy to be wrong about of all of the
above and to see 100 newcomers show up and have 75 of them as
active and constructive contributors (even if remote) three
years from now. However...
john
