On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 09:50:28AM +0200, Carsten Bormann wrote: > On Aug 15, 2018, at 21:52, Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > It’s not a conference - it doesn’t say so on our web pages. It’s a > > meeting of a standards body, but that is considered work by some > > people. > > while I understand that it can be very satisfying, this is the kind of > hair splitting that in the end benefits no-one. > > *Of course* the IETF event is a conference: Whatever a *dictionary* says is irrelevant. What the laws in the host country say is. I'm sure the meeting vs conference designation can make a difference in some cases. The reason a host country might want you to get a worker visa to be compensated for talking at a conference is that the conference might be the sort where locals might be paid to speak otherwise. E.g., a doctors' conference where the attendees are mostly local doctors. If you're not compensated, but still a local might have been then it could still be a problem. These things are almost entirely about protecting locals from foreign competition. But if you're there to meet with and talk to people who are mostly not locals, and where you're not in competition with locals, and where you're not compensated for the act of being there and speaking, then it's less of a problem, and maybe a non-problem altogether. Thus the word 'meeting'. And, personally, given the nature of IETF meetings, I'd call them meetings, not conferences. We do need a distinction between the things those two words refer to, because we really are not like a typical conference. Nico --
