On 8/12/16 13:12, Dave Crocker wrote:
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.
So, there's probably a balance to be struck here. Many of the provisions
of these contracts are written for the benefit of the attendees. In lots
of cases, these protections go against a hotel's interests, which means
that the hotel will not be very motivated to spend a lot of energy
making sure they're being satisfied.
However, if the people protected by these provisions don't know about
them *either*, then they are effectively useless: neither party to the
transaction will take action. I sent the following example to the
meeting venue list some while back, but it bears repeating here, as it
demonstrates the point quite vividly.
Flash back to IETF 86 in Orlando. Late Sunday, the venue hotel -- which
had apparently overbooked quite severely -- began displacing attendees
with valid reservations to a nearby, and significantly lower-quality, hotel:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/86attendees/m_udMZ-e75GxfW_qe45c8E6ZanU
The thing is, the contract had specific provisions to make sure that
overbooking was handled in a certain way; and the provisions that the
hotel had agreed to in writing were far superior to what actually
happened. But because the impacted attendees didn't know about these
provisions, and because (absent any challenge) the hotel had no
incentive to proactively honor them, people had a thoroughly crappy
experience.
After things started to go sideways, Ray posted the relevant contract
provisions
(https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/86all/iuQ4Q3xC4BgEPHuUUix7nrk4BXs),
which actually look pretty good. Kudos to whomever set this up on our
side. It's a shame that such nicely crafted contract clauses went to
utter waste.
This kind of contractual information -- attendees' negotiated rights
when hotels overbook -- should be in the hands of people before they
arrive at the hotel. Had such been the case in Orlando, displaced
attendees could have insisted that the hotel honor their agreement. Far
from being withheld from attendees, these provisions should be published
quite prominently.
/a