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On 4/21/16 09:54, Ted Lemon wrote:
I agree with you to this point. I've seen the importance of the in-person meetings gradually increase over the past 18 years, and I think it would be great if we could reverse the trend. That's going to require a cultural shift, and those are notoriously difficult to effect. So if you want this to change, focus on changing the participant culture. It's going to be long, and it's going to be hard.
Sure. For any single, established bit of work, this is largely true (given sufficiently rich tools to interact and sufficient will to make concessions to time zones), and we can work to make this more true than it is today. What the in-person meetings provide is cross-pollination, in the form of hallway conversations and attendees sitting in on working groups that operate on the periphery of their area of interest. It allows people to identify similarities and trends that would be difficult or impossible to spot with simple mailing list participation. I'm not claiming that people who participate remotely are necessarily less effective. However, the IETF needs a critical mass of these pollinators to spread ideas around. It's also pretty evident that these cross-pollinators are going to get value from the experience of conversing with people on the edges of their area of work, both in the form of intel and in the form of bringing their own interests and needs into the synthesis of the ideas they're coming across. This lets them propose new areas of work that benefit groups they care about. My earlier point was mostly that the trip to BA provided an entirely new set of people -- people with as much of a stake in the Internet as anyone else -- the opportunity to be these pollinators, both providing and generating the benefits I describe above. And that's something we should care about. Even if the basic tenets of fairness don't compel some people, at least the selfish interest of bringing fresh ideas -- and fresh syntheses of ideas -- into the IETF should have clear value. There's also clear growing interest on behalf of South Americans to get involved: it is the only continent that has shown a steady meeting-over-meeting increase in attendance over the past seven meetings (as measured by percentage of attendees) [1]. Perhaps the right metric is not whether these same people attend subsequent meetings in destinations that are remote from their home territory, but whether they continue their involvement by participating remotely and (to a lesser degree) whether they return to the next face-to-face meeting held on their home continent. Based on the foregoing, I assert that putting effort into observing the impact of this kind of excursion from our normal travel pattern has value, and that it should inform future venue selection discussions. /a ____ [1] See https://www.dropbox.com/s/fosw7dcwih0dqvz/attendance-by-continent.png?dl=0 |
