On Sat, 21 May 2016, Ted Hardie wrote:
Inclusiveness:
We would like to facilitate the onsite or remote participation of
anyone who wants to be involved. Every country has limits on who
it will permit within its borders. This principle of
inclusiveness militates against the selection of venues within
countries that impose visa regulations and/or laws that
effectively exclude people on the basis of race, religion, gender,
sexual orientation, or national origin, and to a lesser extent,
reduces the likelihood of selecting countries that use such
attributes to make entry difficult.
This is cast in terms of entry and exclusion, but it is actually about participation. If a country's rules prevent participation by a class of people, that country would be
"militated against", in the words of the draft.
So I can see this part.
In Singapore, there are classes of people who are effectively excluded (e.g. any same sex couple whose child is of age to need both parents present). Whether any member of that
class speaks up at the moment is not the issue, if we believe a family member of that class should be able to attend.
But this example does not relate to IETF participation.
If you pick local laws related to _anything_ as exclusion criteria, you
are going to cut out a lot of the world (also excluding the US)
which then runs against the diversity principle of holding meetings at
different places.
And what would you do with countries such as Morocco, where certain laws
only apply to their own citizens but not visitors (I can share a hotel
room with my foreign girlfriend but not with a Moroccon girlfriend)
I think it is important to keep the focus on "IETF participation" and
keep the secondary benefits of bringing family members as secondary
goals. That is we should consider these, but not completely lose
track of one of our primary goals of diversity.
Paul