On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 2:15 PM, Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 5/28/13 6:20 AM, Christian O'Flaherty wrote: >> Probably, this lack of social interaction in our region is one of >> the main reasons for low participation. Most of latin american >> IETFers are currently living outside the region and they engaged in >> the IETF when living in the US or Europe. It's difficult to be >> involved when no one else around is working in it or think it doesn't >> fit well in their current work. A physical meeting will help to >> "demystify" the IETF, making it "accesible" from a professional >> perspective. > > Any sense of why that didn't happen with Australians after > the Adelaide meeting? If we're able to get a "proportional growth" similar to what happened in Australia it will be a success :-) Latam is a region with 600 million inhabitants compared to 23 million in Australia. But I agree with you and I'm not saying a meeting is going to be enough. In the past it was probably not combined with other activities planned two or three years in advance. We can do something serious here and we know the potential available in the region to empower the IETF even more. Christian > > I'm not opposed to meeting in South America but there have > been an awful lot of assertions about this or that happening > if we do, without a lot of supporting evidence. History, > unfortunately, doesn't support many of these assertions, and > I think beating the meeting location question to death is > at least some small distraction from trying to get at the core > issues. > > For whatever it's worth, I was participating on IETF mailing lists > well before attending a meeting. Granted, I'm a native English > speaker and wasn't dealing with that as an issue but probably > more to the point was that there was work going on in the IETF > that directly impacted work I was doing myself. > > Melinda