On May 28, 2013, at 8:46 AM, Eric Burger <eburger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Riiight. That is why one never has to attend an IETF meeting in person to serve on NOMCOM, one does not need travel support from one's employer to be on the IESG, and why people who never come to IETF meetings are the rule and not the exception with respect to getting documents adopted and published. The IETF has a big problem, IMHO, in that effective participation really does currently seem to require meeting attendance. There's a reason that nomcom members have to show up—if they didn't, they wouldn't be part of the actual culture of IETF, because so much IETF culture is bound up in the physical meetings. The interaction we get in the physical meetings is really important. I would very much like to see the IETF try to discover new ways of using the technology our forebears (and some remaining senior participants) invented to achieve the same effectiveness without requiring us to all burn tons of fuel getting to remote corners of the globe. But "achieve the same effectiveness" is an important requirement for any such new solution. And right now we don't have a solution like that, so we do what we do, and you are right that that means that effective participation in the IETF is much easier for people who are able to attend at least a sufficiency of meetings on an ongoing basis. We should see this as a starting point, not as an end state.