> I did try to stay focused on that detail Yes - understood. Thank you. > I don't either, as long as those don't become part of the > negotiations in ways that can increase costs (financial or > otherwise) to either individuals or the community in other > areas. Right, and I do not believe they are impacting that in any way. > I am also concerned that the number of collateral > activities we are encouraging may increase the space and other > facilities requirements for IETF meetings, thereby restricting > the range of places we can meet. That concern may be entirely > unjustified (I don't know enough about either our requirements > or hotel profiles these days) but would find it interesting if > the IAOC added at least a count of the number of auxiliary > meeting rooms (IAB, IESG, IAOC, Nomcom, ISOC, etc.) we need and > perhaps how they are being paid for to its reports. The kind of touristy requirements that we talked about in this thread are, as far as I know, having zero impact. And certainly zero priority at least if you ask this IETF chair. (But the impact of various IETF groups from design teams to the boards meeting during the week is non-zero, and we also have some amount of interops, associated groups meeting, bits and bites, and so on. Some of that is absolutely necessary, and the rest is IMHO beneficial to the IETF even if in theory we could cut some of it. I think it would be a great idea for the IAOC to give a summary report of meeting space usage after each meeting. I suspect the key issue for us to be able to meet in venus though is the big meeting rooms, not the IESG- or interop-type rooms.) > I was looking for a simple clarification > that would put at least those impressions to rest. Understood. Hope you are getting it here. > I also think it would be useful for the IAOC (or > the meetings committee) to be a little bit more open with the > community about what the "all requirements" are and how they are > generally prioritized. It would even be helpful for the > community to understand which of those requirements are most > often causing locations to be excluded (or to exclude > themselves) because they cannot be met and, again following Dave > Crocker's lead, which sets of participant preferences and needs > are being optimized. If nothing else, a little more clarity and > openness about those topics might head off at least a few > discussions like this one. Good points. Let me talk to the IAOC/meetings committee/Ray. However, please do not expect an algorithmic RFC for site selection and prioritisation of all criteria. But maybe we can provide more thoughts about where we are and what kinds of things we are thinking in picking the meeting locations. FWIW, from my perspective we usually struggle with pretty basic things, such as simultaneous fulfilment of 1-1-1 round-robin, functional site, venue costs (IETF and participant), travel-abiity, avoiding any special problems (visas, Internet access, etc), and finding a host. Costs have been a big issue in IAOC’s mind during 2014. Also, we’ve been very lucky for the generous sponsorships that we’ve been getting - thank you! But sponsorship tends to happen in the near term while meetings have to be contracted far in advance, and a fair part of IETF sponsorship money comes from sources that are location-dependent. Which means we are committing before knowing whether we’ll get sufficient sponsorship in some cases, and occasionally we have to say no to sponsorship proposals because there is no room for them it the calendar. And then we have a number of destination-specific problems, even in places with a lot of IETF participation. All of these problems can be solved, and indeed, I think we’ve had fairly good success overall with our meetings with one or two exceptions. We also have long-term sponsorship/multi-year hosting deals, which reduce the risks mentioned above. And we are identifying and re-using places and hotel chains that we’ve been happy with before. Jari
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