Hi Eliot,
My comments up thread suggested that we start from a set of community agreed principles and use those to evaluate whether a particular venue did or did not meet our requirements; the contrast I was aiming for was from attempting to reason from individuals' reports of their own level of comfort or concern. A corollary question is, of course, what those principles ought to be. I started with Fred's statement because I believe it is a reasonable statement to use as a basis for discuss. I don't agree with all of it (I'd disagree with the weight given accessibility, for example, which seems less than it ought to be), but its statements on inclusion seemed to me critical for any group that aspires to base its legitimacy on its openness.
If I understand you correctly, you see any and all of the principles as ones we might choose to let slide in order to meet some other goal. In that context, I find the phrase "weighting the impact to participants" to be worrying. If you naively attempt to do that weighting by assessing the impact per individual and multiplying it out by the number of individuals you expect to fall in the class, you can easily end up continually disadvantaging minority groups. Doing it fairly by any means will be difficult.
I personally believe, because of the importance of openness to our basic operation, principles of inclusiveness should not be part of the meeting trade-off except in extraordinary circumstances.On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 5:15 AM, Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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