Howdy,
On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 9:49 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
One of my concerns, which parallels your
comments, is that the more Hackathons and convention-like
activities (including tutorials, time for essentially
unconstrained informal gatherings, exhibition areas, etc.), come
to be considered and seen as important in
laying out the schedule, the more likely we will see evaluations
and decisions shift as to who gets support for attendance at
IETF meetings and how much work people have to do to justify
that support.
One of the difficulties with English is that it sometimes hard to tell whether a conjunction is meant to gather things into a set or distinguish them from each other. In your comment above you say "Hackathons and convention-like activities". I'm hoping that in this case you meant to distinguish them from each other.
Hackathons are, at least in my opinion, about as far from convention-like exhibitions as you can get while sharing the same hotel food. We are hosting them in part because we want to see decisions shift on who gets support for attendance, so that folks who are writing the code that implements and informs our specifications get to come. We don't want to do that to disfavor any current attendee, of course, but to broaden the base of participation in a way that is particularly useful to producing good standards.
Hackathons are, at least in my opinion, about as far from convention-like exhibitions as you can get while sharing the same hotel food. We are hosting them in part because we want to see decisions shift on who gets support for attendance, so that folks who are writing the code that implements and informs our specifications get to come. We don't want to do that to disfavor any current attendee, of course, but to broaden the base of participation in a way that is particularly useful to producing good standards.
I hope you concur with that goal.
regards,
Ted Hardie
