On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 6:58 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 08:00:19PM -0500, Arturo Servin wrote: >> Hard times may come, some people will ask why the Internet standards >> are just developed in some places and will challenge us. > > And here I thought that the standards were developed on the list. > > (For the record, I am not opposed at all to holding a meeting in Latin > America -- I'm personally in favour of it. But we also don't hold > meetings in India or Myanmar, and for much the same reason: we have a > tiny minority of participants from those places, and given the funding > model the IETF can't afford to hold full-on meetings as a matter of > outreach. There may be ways to fix that, and I understand the IAOC is > investigating options. Note that the IETF is always looking for > sponsors for meetings!) I don't know enough to comment about Myanmar but the argument for not holding a meeting in India rings quite hollow. There has been a rising number of participants from India (both from Indians living in India and abroad). This is due to two reasons: 1. Internet connectivity and awareness becoming better. Remote participation has become easier. 2. Better understanding of web technology and relation of standards to them (examples HTTP/2.0, websockets) 3. Several American MNCs such as Cisco / Juniper setting up offices and engineers from these organizations getting involved. SIGcomm (http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2010/) and W3C (http://wwwconference.org/www2011/) have both happened here in India in Delhi and Hyderabad respectively. I know the participant profile and numbers are different for IETF but it is not an insurmountable mountain to climb. As is usual, I am willing to help if the IAOC is looking at this part of the world to hold a meeting. -- Vinayak