On 5/22/16 7:18 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
What I find worrying is that we may end up foreclosing participation to new members because of their governments' laws. They need to be considered in this discussion, and thus far it feels as though they have not been, and often aren't.
You know, I've been arguing for a long time that we would benefit a lot from making the organization less dependent on meetings, and the feedback I've gotten from you and others taking the position that it's okay to meet in locations like Singapore is that no, we really need face-to-face discussions and hallway conversations. Early in this discussion everybody agreed that yes, our top priority is getting work done, but here you are suggesting that maybe getting work done can take a backseat to making sure that people who are not currently involved and not doing any IETF work can attend. Then there's the notion that we do our work on mailing list being chucked aside to be replaced by the flat statement that if someone cannot attend a meeting we are foreclosing participation by them (with the implied suggestion that the requirements of people who are not yet involved trump the requirements of some long-time participants). I am not a fan of process documents and meta documents and all the other sorts of documents that, along with our problematic position(s) on diversity, make us look and function like the traditional telecomm standards bodies but I think that in this case we'd clearly benefit from a normative statement about what the actual goal of meetings is, along with trying to develop some understanding of what the cost of missing a meeting is (or should be). Melinda