On Fri, 20 Jul 2012, Behcet Sarikaya wrote:
I don't understand why this issue is coming up. Maybe you don't know, IETF 84 falls in the month of Ramadan for Muslims and nobody asked to change it?
I think focusing on the religious roots of the holiday is misguided. The question is what effect the holiday is likely to have on meeting attendance. I think the IETF also tries to avoid secular holidays that would interfere with the attendance of a large number of typical IETF attendees.
Here's an example: we avoid the (secular) Thanksgiving holiday in the US -- it falls on a Thursday in late November, and it's common for people to take both the Thursday and Friday as holiday. Thanksgiving is such a big deal in the US, and we get so many US attendees, that the IETF would avoid that holiday no matter where the meeting was being held.
Similarly, I think we would take into account local and regional holidays at our meeting sites, both religious and secular. We would probably avoid having a meeting in Amsterdam's center (or, really, anywhere in the Netherlands) on Queen's Day.
Would overlapping with Easter draw down attendance enough to warrant avoiding it? Probably. It's a big enough risk that shifting a week seems sane.
While Ramadan is religiously very significant, I think it is observed by relatively few of our regular meeting attendees and even those that do observe it may be willing to travel during it. Hence the difference in how they're being handled.
-- Sam