On 11/10/2012 10:38 AM, Arturo Servin wrote: > When I said "the ietf thinks" I reefer about the consciousness of the > IETF as a group. I know, I'm just not really sure it has one. I think that there's enormous diversity among the reasons people participate and what it is they hope to get done. > I disagree with you about meeting location as a factor "openness". I > think that it is an important one to consider. I think there's a lot of value in sharing the travel pain, but I'm not sure that "openness" is one of them. I'm actually pretty sure it's not. If you're not participating because travel is onerous and you would participate if a meeting were held closer, what happens when the meeting goes back to being held someplace inconvenient four months later? I'm certainly not arguing against holding meetings in a wider range of places and going to countries/ continents we haven't in the past, but rather I'm concerned about misplaced emphasis on meetings both as some sort of metric of accessibility and as the mechanism for getting things done. The IETF works by progressing documents. Writing documents, reviewing documents, editing documents - these things don't require meeting participation, and indeed I'd suggest that requiring meeting participation, either by fiat or by implication, would work to reduce openness, discourage participation from both people working as individuals and people working for small companies, etc., and is likely to reduce the diversity of the participant pool while effectively hiding IETF process by pulling it off mailing lists. I'd rather that didn't happen, and that has nothing to do with meeting location. Melinda