Eric and Andrew have hit on a good point here.
It's important for this policy to balance aspirations of a broader participant base against practical realities of getting work done. While we might aspire to a world where a 1-1-1 distribution aligns well with our participant base and is also cost effective, that appears to be not quite the world we live in.
I'm fine giving the IAOC the brief to work toward that objective, but if we do that, we also need to give them the flexibility to make pragmatic decisions.
--Richard
On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Eric Rescorla <ekr@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Andrew,
Thanks for raising this.
While the stated rationale in S 2. is to spread travel pain around,
I don't really think this gets us to 1-1-1-*.
First, if you look at historical demographics, over the past 12 IETFs,
we have 23% Asia, 26% Europe, and 42% NA). Put another way, the last
time we had > 1/3 Asian attendance was IETF 94 in Yokohama, and the
last time we had less than 1/3 NA attendance was IETF 79 in Beijing.
So, a policy that was designed to match per-continent attendance would
be more like 2-1-1-*.
Second, continent is not a very good proxy for travel pain, both
because Asia is so large (for instance, the shortest Tokyo to
Singapore route is 7:25 out and 7:10 back (on JAL) and the shortest
Tokyo - Honolulu route (ANA) is 7:20/8:10, so not really much
different at all) and because flight connections are such a big
contributor ( for instance, SFO-BKK is almost 20 hours, whereas
SFO-NRT is 11).
Bottom line, if this is supposed to be real requirements rather
than just aspirations, I think it needs a rethink.
-EkrOn Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 6:34 PM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Dear IESG,
On Thu, Apr 05, 2018 at 01:12:40PM -0700, The IESG wrote:
>
> The IESG has received a request from the Meeting Venue WG (mtgvenue) to
> consider the following document: - 'High level guidance for the meeting
> policy of the IETF'
> <draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy-04.txt> as Best Current Practice In a recent discussion, the IAOC came to realise that the documents
draft-ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process and
draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy may be in some tension. One of
them requires the IASA to balance meeting venues over time, and the
other has requirements that a meeting must meet.
One possible difficulty that arises from the combination is if one
region turns out to be vastly more expensive than others. In that
case, some criteria for each venue may not be met in one region. The
result might also be financially ruinous for the IETF in general.
The current IAOC interprets the drafts such that any of the criteria
except those in section 3.1 of
draft-ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process may be traded against
any other, over several years if need be, in order to meet the
geographic distribution policy described in
draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy. Assuming the documents are
published as they are currently written, we will use that
interpretation as governing IASA implementation decisions. It is
worth noting that, among the criteria that could be traded are those
of affordability. If that is not the interpretation of the IETF
community, then some clarification is needed to the text.
Best regards,
Andrew Sullivan
for the IAOC
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
