FWIW, I got a Saturday-to-Saturday booking on the first try, about a half hour after the announcement came out--at that point a lot of rooms were already gone, including all of the executive rooms. I suspect what's going on is that the reservation system isn't handling fragmentation very well. We can complain about that all we want, but it's simply out of the scope of something that the IETF can get in a contract with a hotel to try to fix their IT infrastructure. The fact that we see this a lot is most likely because we are interacting with the same system the same way a lot.
The only way to make this work better would be for the IETF to set up a system where people could bid in advance on what they want, and contention could be resolved with a random number generator rather than who got there first. This would be a lot fairer for people in non-US time zones, and would probably generate a _lot_ more discussion on the IETF mailing list. :)
On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 2:12 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/12/2016 10:55 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
(i) the IAOC should be making the hotel contracts public (at
least in redacted form) so that the community can review them
and make suggestions about the importance of situations like
this, how to avoid them, and how important it is to do so or
I'm on the Meetings Committee, so I get to participate in the lengthy process of selecting venues. The committee does not, however, have anything to do with the contracting process and it has few direct discussions about contract details. The committee is pretty diligent, but I don't remember actually seeing a contract or even believing it would be helpful. (And I'm sure folk will be surprised to learn that I suspect I generate the most questions and suggestions about meeting details of anyone on the committee...)
Here's why the above suggestion is exactly wrong:
The IETF community is a customer to the IAOC process. It needs to be very clear about its functional/cost/etc. requirements about venues and it needs to press to have them satisfied.
What it does /not/need to do is emulate administrative and legal staff tasks of implementing those requirements. To have the general IETF community pore over contract details is to have invite non-experts to debate about details rather than debate about requirements.
Decide what geographic, cost, access, and other functional issues have to be resolve. Resolve them. Then let the folk who have to make it happen figure out how.
In the current case, my guess is that what should be debated is how large a room block is needed at the main hotel. (That probably should be in terms of percentage of estimated total attendance.) You don't need to see a contract to settle on that choice.