[cc to ietf@ietf] On 14 Mar 2012, at 14:58 , Nathaniel Borenstein wrote: > One idea I've toyed with idly for years is halfway in between: keep the physical meetings, but break them up into multiple locations. We could have physical meetings in Europe, North America, and Asia, with strong telecom links among them. We'd still have to all be on the same schedule, but the people making the time shift would at least be surrounded by others on the same odd schedule, and there'd be critical mass for services like meals in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, the travel costs and visa hassles would be reduced. That would combine the worst aspects of being at a meeting with the worst aspects of NOT being at a meeting. Also, regional travel is a lot cheaper than intercontinental travel, but when you add up all the other costs you really don't save that much. We still haven't figured out how to use jabber effectively during meetings (either the jabber channel replicates all the info that's also in the audio stream or it's pretty much idle), so PLEASE no experiments in this area. Let others figure this out and then we can adopt what works.