IAOC Meeting location selection

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Given the recent discusion on travel to IETF78, I wanted to summarize how the IAOC makes decisions on IETF meeting locations.

We first set the dates and general geographic location about three to four years in advance. For example, the future meeting calendar at http://www.ietf.org/meetings/0mtg-sites.txt goes out through the end of 2013. We are maintaining on average a rotation between Asia, North America, and Europe with the goal of no more than two of three meetings in North America. We do this because we believe the community wants the dates set well in advance and to have a reasonable balance between NA, Europe, and Asia.

The IAOC's most important criteria for meeting locations is where can we have a successful IETF meeting. That is, hold a meeting where the IETF can get its work done. The next items are 1) having the meeting and hotel rooms in the same building or a conference center next to the hotels, 2) direct international flights, 3) reasonable costs for the IETF and attendees, and 4) the ability to deploy an IETF style network in the venue. This list isn't ordered and we don't always achieve all of this for every meeting, but these are the goals. There are always tradeoffs.

If we have a host for a specific meeting and the host has a location preference we try to honor their preference. Having a host for a meeting significantly reduces the cost to have an IETF meeting. This is especially important for meetings outside of North America where the meetings rooms are not included with a block of hotel rooms. Due to the current Visa situation in the US we are planning many meetings outside of the US.

In the case of hosted meetings we might relax some of our criteria like direct flights or hotel and meeting rooms in the same building, but we will never pick a venue where we don't think we can have a successful IETF meeting. For non-hosted meetings, we try to pick convenient locations and vary the locations. That is, we try to not always meet in the same city in the same geographic area.

For example, we are currently trying to decide between holding a meeting in Vancouver and Quebec City. We are confident both could have a successful IETF meeting and both have hotel and meeting space for the dates we are looking for, but there are differences. Note, we looked at other Canadian cities, but these were the only cities where we could find acceptable hotel and meeting space for our dates. We have had meetings in Vancouver twice before and it meets most of the above criteria, but at the same time Quebec City appears to be a nice new place to meet but doesn't have as many direct international flights. We decided to ask the community for feedback in the form of a poll. I would note that the current results show a strong leaning toward Quebec City and this is somewhat at odds with some of the email thread on IETF78 in that many people seem to be willing to trade some travel inconvenience for a new venue. We will publish the results of the poll when it is completed on June 1.

In the case of Hiroshima, that is being hosted by WIDE, we know there will be challenges for some to travel between Tokyo and Hiroshima, we are working with the host to provide a lot of information to make this as painless as possible. There is already a link on the IETF web page with a link to this information. We are planning something similar for Maastricht. Also note, that we were originally planning another location in Asia but the original sponsor was not able to do the meeting, the WIDE group helped us out to find a location in Japan. There are other possible locations in Japan, but Hiroshima was the only location that had availability on our dates.

For the Masstricht meeting we had a potential host who wanted to sponsor IETF78 in the Netherlands. Three venues in the Netherlands were available on the dates we wanted, but the other two were significantly more expensive. Consequently, we choose Masstricht
knowing that the local travel would be more complex.

The process inside of the IAOC for venue selection is two fold. We have a meetings committee that includes the IAD, IAOC members, NOC and community volunteers, and the secretariat. Most of the work happens in this committee and they produce a list of choices for a meeting in a specific geographic location and meeting dates. There is normally a site visit if it is a new IETF location. The meeting committee prepares a summary of the choices including costs, along with their recommendation. These are presented to the IAOC as a whole. Based on this input the IAOC makes the final selection. Once that is done the IAD and the secretariat work with the venue to develop a contract. The IAOC will also approve the contract.

If there are people interested in joining the meeting committee please let me know. We are always on the lookout for people who have a lot of personal travel and meeting planning experience.

Please let me know if you have additional questions. I expect to get a lot of questions at the Stockholm plenary :-)

Bob Hinden
IAOC Chair

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