--On Tuesday, 06 March, 2007 10:36 -0500 Ray Pelletier
<rpelletier@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
I was under the impression that one of the goals of the
advance meeting planning was to more easily secure
international sites for meetings, where the hotels require
earlier booking. That doesn't quite seem to work out,
however?
These days you need to be looking a minimum 18 - 24 months out
to find available qualified sites. It's why we developed the
2008 - 2010 calendar and, I expect, will be adding 2011 and
2012 dates before Chicago.
Ray, can I at least express the hope that longer lead times will
permit more diligent checking of issues surrounding meeting
locations that might prevent people from attending or cause
serious problems after arrival? When these issues are known,
understood by IAOC and the Secretariat, perhaps discussed with
the community, and then accepted as tradeoffs for an attractive
meeting location (good facilities, reasonable balance of costs,
extensive IETF participation in the area, etc.) that is fine.
But, when they sneak up on us and turn into "gotcha"s after the
meeting is committed and can't be changed, I (at least) think
that is a problem.
Examples, some of which have been discussed extensively in the
past and some of which have not, include:
(i) visa policies that may prevent significant numbers of IETF
participants who regularly come to meetings from attending.
(ii) health insurance, immunization, or health history
requirements that may prove a barrier to getting into the
country.
(iii) environmental issues, such as air quality, prevalence of
disease, or crime rates (see example 1, below) that might
constrain attendance.
(iv) locations that require excessively high fares and/or long
travel times for an excessive number of people, especially when
other alternatives are feasible in the same general area.
(v) hotel policies that are inconsistent with the combination of
these long lead times and the way we hold meetings (see example
2, below).
In each of these cases, I think you, the IAOC and the
Secretariat must take responsibility for their decisions, not,
e.g., enable a Wiki, copy some vague information from the hotel
web site that mostly has to do with driving directions, and hope
that participants and attendees will sort things out.
john
Example 1: Several members of the community have unpleasant
memories of IETF in Paris due to a rather high rate of thefts in
and around the venue. The Salk Airport Transit Guide, whose
editors are not normally given to hysteria or being alarmist,
includes some interesting comments about Prague (a level of
warning I haven't noticed about any other city in the world).
Under the entry for taxis from the airport they say "Warning:
Prague's taxi drivers have earned as nasty reputation for
illegal practices, resulting in exorbitant overcharges,
intimidation, and even stealing wallets in the resulting
confusion. [...] At the airport, take a taxi only where a
dispatcher is present. [...] Avoid, if possible, taxi stands at
[...]." (The stuff I've elided is no better.) About the local
buses, they say "Warning: Outright theft by organized gangs has
been known to take place on some bus routes. Be alert!". I
don't know if these sorts of issues were considered when
selecting the site, but there has certainly been no evidence so
far that they were.
Example 2: These long lead times encourage many of us to make
hotel reservations a very long time in advance (see Ole's recent
note "on behalf of hotel-bookers anonymous"). But IETF, and
IETF-related, schedules --including schedules for some meetings
that might occur from the Friday or Saturday before the meeting
through the Sunday after it, are not pinned down until much
closer to the meeting and knowledge of who should be at those
meetings may come later yet (e.g., I don't know know if the IAB
is meeting on Saturday, but sometimes they do, and some of the
the people who should be at such a meeting if it is being held
presumably found out only last week). In the case of this
particular meeting at least, suppose reservations are made
months in advance and the "IETF Block" closed --either via
timeout or because the room count is filled. Now a person comes
along who has a reservation at the IETF but now needs to add a
day at one end or the other. The response from the hotel is
"we have the rooms available, but do we have a deal for you:
either you can have the same room all week (at EUR 420 a day, if
I recall) or you can try to make a separate reservation for the
extra day (at that rate or higher) and risk our having to move
you, possibly to a smoking room next to one that is under
construction. As another version, this hotel changed my
reservation from "non-smoking" to "smoking" without any notice
to me. I happened to go to the web site and therefore noticed
and a phone call to Hilton straightened it out, but then the
hotel did it again. I called Hilton again, and got it fixed
again (and an apology about things "the property" was doing that
were not under their control, but I'm not feeling really good
about the situation and, from my point of view, my problem isn't
with the hotel but with IAD/ Secretariat/ IAOC choices and,
presumably, contractual details you negotiated.
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