Hi Eliot,
Quoting your item message, as you prefer, and responding inline.
On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 5:40 AM, Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ted,
On 5/23/16 10:31 AM, Ted Hardie wrote:
On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Ted,
Put more bluntly: there will always be some group who is at least inconvenienced and at most prohibited from attending a meeting.
A commitment to inclusiveness is something that takes work. If you give up on it ab initio as impossible, it is not a principle, it is window dressing.
You have, however inadvertently, taken a single sentence out of context and distorted the meaning of my message. I wrote in that same message:
Quite frankly barring a location itself is a form of exclusion, especially when taking into account economics. It may be an appropriate exclusion if going there means that many others would be excluded. Kathleen and Suresh, and later Dave and Narelle, have made clear that diversity/inclusiveness is a broad notion. Gender, sexual preference, and nationality are all listed in Fred's draft, as is religion. {...}
And this:
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. That is particularly problematic because it risks the future of this organization, which isn't growing very quickly, to begin with.
While you are certainly entitled to worry about this, reacting to the worry as you have still feels to me like abandoning the principles ab initio, rather than trying to apply them and seeing where the rough points lie.
One issue that your and others' analyses seems to imply is that the 1-1-1-* formulation is not sufficient. If it were, finding a small number of venues that suited us and shuttling among them would generate the fairness required. If the pure 1-1-1-* were sufficient, knowing one venue worked (as a strawman, Yokohama) would mean would not have to investigate other places. But your analysis suggests that you believe that this is not enough, and that we need to also go to South Korea, China, Taiwan, etc., to be fair.
Or am I misreading you?
And so, it's a matter of who we decide to exclude,
And I think this is an astonishingly bad formulation. I would say instead "It's a matter of how include folks who cannot meet in a specific venue".
and the impact that will have on the future of this organization. The only question is whether we will make those decisions consciously and conscientiously or not.
Based on the criteria discussed up thread, if you seek such a rigid standard, you will exclude fair access
(by the way, your use of "fair access" here is what caused me to conclude that you did not think 1-1-1-* was enough to generate fairness. If that is wrong, explaining would help)
to engineers from some of the largest and most populous countries on the planet, including India, China, most of Japan, and by the way South Korea, all but one of those places we have already visited. These people are not simply going to evaporate if we don't accept their participation, but rather they will find other avenues to acceptance of their work. At the same time, critics will say that the IETF is a western endeavor that promotes only western values
I think if we come to consensus on the values, they are our values.
and not a truly international organization. This, itself, is a form of fragmenting of the Internet.
I think that particular hyperbole is damaging. We are not fragmenting the Internet by requesting that the physical meetings of one of its technical bodies be constituted to treat its own principles seriously.
Ted
Eliot