Ted, I do not believe that the IAOC used "novelty" as one of their criteria. My understanding was that this was an attempt to find a venue convenient to Asian participants as part of the normal meeting cycle that also happened to be affordable. Perhaps someone from the IAOC would like to comment further. I'd also be curious to know if the number "100" had any particular import in this process, referring to Jon Peterson's comments. Wikipedia indicates that quite a number of countries, including one in which I believe you resided, do not support parental rights of same sex couples. If that is what this is about, there are a number countries we have already been to that would have caused the LGBT community a problem. We have had in a problem getting people into our meetings based on their nationalities. Certainly the Chinese among us must be having a good chuckle about this conversation, especially those that were turned down for their visas by one country or another. Some of these issues are simply unavoidable. Consider the person who is in the process of a visa renewal in the U.S. In other cases, the situation is far more complicated. Case and point: the last time I went to Russia it required an exhaustive visa process, which I am given to understand is due to how Russians are treated by the United States. There are many places where one can be arrested for saying or printing certain things. The laws vary. This was a serious concern when we went to one country in particular. We've made the conscious decision to weight other values over freedom of speech. The same has happened less consciously with freedom of religion, even though that has had at least some impact on us with many stores being closed on certain days. Each of these issues is not binary, but rather countries' positions reside on a spectrum. Their summation is not a simple ANDing. Were it so, we would not have any place to go. The IAOC needs to consider these matters, weighting the impact to participants. On the whole I sympathize with Stephen's position that the IAOC should be as transparent as possible in its decision making. Furthermore, certainly polling the community for their views is always appropriate if the poll is well constructed (queue Dave Crocker). Eliot
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