On Apr 23, 2012, at 4:06 PM, Thomas Nadeau wrote: > > I agree with you. I've always been puzzled as to why anyone needs to know who specifically attended a meeting. What is that information used for later? The ACWG working group is considering proposals for a higher-bandwidth alternative to RFC 1149. One proposal is to attach flash chips to the birds' legs. This proposal gets accepted, and eventually makes it to RFC. Company A implements this new standard, and then gets sued by Company B, because they have a patent for attaching flash chips to bird legs. When asked why they're only mentioning it now, they claim they had never followed the ACWG. The blue sheets can prove that Bob from Company B was actually at the meeting. Of course if it comes to this, Company A can subpoena the blue sheets for all ACWG meetings where this proposal had been discussed. I also don't think that public bluesheets would eliminate the subpoena. I think you would usually need to get an official copy from the IETF through a subpoena, rather printing it out from the website for a court filing. In any case, just scanning them and keeping them on disk makes replying to the subpoena just as easy. There's no significant difference between sending a link and sending a PDF file. > As far as I can, no one ever has gone back to associate email addresses with speakers at the mic, actual attendee lists or presentations or something. Isn't the point just to gauge how full the room was so that we can book an appropriately sized room for the next meeting? If that is the case, then just having the chairs take a rough estimate of how many people attended (or even just state a percentage of occupied seats) should suffice, right? Yes, but that's not the only reason.