> On Jul 22, 2019, at 10:50 PM, Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On 7/22/19 10:41 PM, Rich Kulawiec wrote: >> There is no conflict here. Meeting travel is expensive, onerous, and >> simply not feasible for many people due to a variety of circumstances. >> Decreasing the requirement for it will enable participation by a wider >> and more diverse community. > > Nominally, we don't require meeting attendance to be an effective > IETF participant, but that's increasingly being met with a wink and a > <nudge>. I do think that there's an important question in there > about whether or not this is actually what we want. I think Elliot > went straight to the follow-on question of how to ease that requirement > (if that's, in fact, what we want) and made a few problematic > assumptions about how the process of figuring that out might work, but I > do think that the base question - Do we really want to functionally > require participants to come to meetings? - deserves some attention. I think the issue is the usual stuff we all know: - People don’t post things on lists that they are willing to say in person - Sometimes e-mail isn’t the best way to have a discussion - in-person builds a relationship and trust in ways that other technologies just can’t - I have had things make it to RFC without a need to attend a meeting and the conversations happened on-list or off-list - Not all WGs are equal, some do this better than others, it’s not the chairs but often the participants that matter the most in this success IMO I agree there’s a bit of a wink, but it’s also about the support people receive from their employer. It varies by person and group even and can make quite a difference. - Jared
