Re: Meetings in other regions

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--On Saturday, July 15, 2006 6:36 PM +0200 Brian E Carpenter <brc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Patrick,

It may have got lost in this thread, but Fred has got the nub
of
the argument here: the IETF's goal is to do its work as
efficiently
as possible, and that means assembling at locations that are
(on some sort of average) convenient for our active
participants.
In practical terms, that means assembling in countries or
regions
with a good number of current participants.

It also means such things as:

   * picking places within those countries or regions that have
   good airports with easy (and multiple) international
   connections.  Even San Diego is a little marginal in that
   regard.  Based on experience in the last year or so, I'd
   suggest that Cape Town and Marrakech (suggested in another
   posting) should be utterly disqualified (although J-berg and
   Casablanca are more plausible on this dimension).

   * picking places where we can be assured of adequate, and
   rock-solid, connectivity at both the meeting site and, if
   different, the hotel(s).  That ought to be easy, but we
   aren't there yet.  When I was in Marrakech (at an ICANN
   meeting) a few weeks ago, we lost the network multiple times
   due to difficulties with the international link and
   insufficient backup/ alternate path bandwidth (see below).
   There were also some problems that, in principle (but not in
   practice) could have been fixed or avoided locally, but an
   international link outage from a remote location can easily
   be a showstopper.  Similarly, while last week's meeting was
   superb in many respects, the condition of the network in the
   Delta was effective at preventing many of us from working
   overnight... whether to catch up on day job activities or to
   work on drafts, the impact is reduced productivity and, to
   some degree, an incentive to stay home rather than attend
   meetings.

My own view, even if it is not politically correct, is that IETF should leave the outreach to exotic places to ISOC, ICANN, and others. I'm very much in favor of our continuing to meet in some proportionate way in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific -- and other places if we have adequate participation. But let's stick to the places from which we have adequate participation and where we can run an efficient meeting with efficient transport to and from the location. The theory that we should go to places to stimulate participation from those places really does not work: our real work requires extensive read-in, not just skimming a few documents and going to a newcomer's orientation (if that). The people from remote places whom we want to have participate in person should already be participating via mailing lists.

The model underlying the pie chart is a little weak in that regard, since it shows meeting attendance rather than participation. Perhaps we should be looking to ways to measure participation that counts effective mailing list participants so as to increase the priority of the places from which they come. But going to a place that is difficult for most participants to get to, with network performance and availability that is hard to predict in advance, in the hope of getting more useful participation from that area, strikes me as yet another way to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Outreach is important, and welcoming new active contributors
is important, but the dominant consideration is a location that
is convenient and effective for our current active
contributors

Yes, and that brings me to....

Patrick Vande Walle wrote:

The place where we had the ICANN meeting in Marrakech
provided fast connectivity, very good mobile phone coverage
and all you would need for a productive meeting, despite the
fact that it was located  in Africa.

Interesting. We either have different criteria or were at different meetings. Let's ignore the 802.11 network, which frequently became unusable apparently due to causes one could have experienced anywhere. I saw the audio stream to outside locations collapse several times, the international links suffer outages that took some time to resolve, and so on. Until ICANN staff managed to cut the hotel network over into the meeting network, the hotel network and its provisioning arrangements were completely swamped by ICANN participants (and that type of cutover arrangement can't always be worked out on short notice) I don't have hard data, but my subjective impression from listening to people complain is that the meeting may have set a record for lost luggage in recent years. I'd love to go back there on vacation, but it is not a place I can recommend holding a meeting that is strongly dependent on good quality Internet connections with 100% uptime.

 This is a counter
example to what your are trying to demonstrate.

Unfortunately, it is an example, not a counter-example.

There are
many places places in Africa, Asia-Pacific  and Latin America
where you could have a productive meeting. One only needs to
look for them.

Sure. But if one needs the types of facilities and connectivity that IETF needs, I think you are underestimating the difficulties of the search... and of being sure one has the right place and facilities once one finds them.

It is more in terms of interacting with the local
community  to find out  what they expect to come out  of a
standardization process.

But changing that requires a level of outreach to which the IETF has not aspired. See my comments about existing participants above. Think about how much "interacting with the local community" we did in Montreal. Remember the comments made in Marrakech that ICANN wasn't doing main sessions in French or Arabic and contemplate the costs, delays, and difficulty of parallel translation of IETF materials.

 The hypothesis by which whatever is
good for the Northern hemisphere is automatically fine for
the rest of the world seems slightly colonialist to me.

Such a hypothesis would be very unattractive if anyone had it or offered it. But, in the time I've been around the IETF, I have never heard such a thing suggested in seriousness.

And, to save writing an extra note just for this...
--On Saturday, July 15, 2006 6:00 AM -0400 JORDI PALET MARTINEZ <jordi.palet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Definitively there are several countries: Spain, Mexico,
Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama.

Ok, this discussion just passed over into the unreal. I assume that one reason we have been meeting increasingly in Canada (Vancouver last fall, Montreal now) is because it is getting harder for some active participants to get visa to come to the US. So let's site a meeting in a place where it is illegal for those holding US passports to travel and in which it might be illegal to bring in the equipment needed to run the meeting. Remember that percentage of draft authors from another posting? Want the IESG to attend? Some of the other countries on that list are plausible if the right city is chosen. Others... well, see my comments about connectivity above. Those work if our purpose is to show that we hold meetings in such places. If the purpose is to get work done, no possible way.

best,
    john


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