Bob,
I'd like to express my thanks for this information. I believe
that, if the community had more information of this sort,
updated as needed, we would have fewer firestorms when meeting
sites are announced.
When you have time, I (and I believe others) would like to
understand better how you evaluate "reasonable costs for the
IETF and attendees". I think it is general knowledge that it
is possible to trade IETF costs off against participant costs
(e.g., making things cheaper for the IETF and more expensive for
participants). It would be good to know how the participant
costs are estimated and how the two are balanced.
Similarly, there is presumably a point at which sponsor
preferences have to give way to other considerations. Could you
give us a sense as to when that occurs? Put differently, at
what point might you decide that dealing with a particular
potential sponsor's preferences are sufficiently inflexible
and/or onerous that you lose interest in sponsorship from that
organization? It appears to me, for example, that the IAOC has,
more than once, dropped both the "same facility" and "direct
international flights" requirements, and pushed the boundaries
of the "participant costs" one in order to get a sponsor and
accommodate their needs. That isn't necessarily the wrong
decision, but I believe the community should be better
informed... and that we would have much less
ruckus if it were.
regards and thanks again,
john
--On Wednesday, May 27, 2009 22:15 -0700 Bob Hinden
<bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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
>...
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