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Re: Excellent choice for summer meeting location!

2005-01-04 16:24:00
On 4-jan-05, at 19:33, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

A sponsor might find that hotels and meeting rooms may be cheaper in a
smaller city, but that has to be balanced against the cost of attendees'
flights, availability of venues, and other suitability factors.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of these factors. As far as I can tell, this doesn't happen (at least not explicitly). It looks to me that meeting venue selection is by and large dictated by previous experience and assumptions. (And in many instances by what's cheapest/easiest for "the organization".)

Most major world cities are airline hubs with nonstop international flights;

Assumption. For instance, in Europe the cities are much closer together, so medium-sized cities don't necessarily have an airport (either at all or one with intercontinental flights). However, we do have good railroads so generally, this isn't much of a problem. (For instance, the entire province of South Holland, with the cities The Hague and Rotterdam in it, has 3.4 million inhabitants but only a tiny 1 runway civilian airport. But with the train you're at Schiphol (Amsterdam) airport in 30 - 45 minutes.)

However, those IETF members who cannot attend (particularly since you've
increased the cost of doing so) might not be able to participate if the
venue doesn't have sufficient bandwidth to support streaming the meeting.

Bandwidth is a non-issue. Any place in the developed world that's big enough has fiber or is close enough to fiber for a microwave hop.

There are many alternatives for the current way IETF meetings are organized. For instance, the summer meeting could be done at a university. The bigger ones should have enough space. That would probably be very cheap. Off-season tourist spots are less radical but also interesting.

But the question is: what are we trying to optimize for?


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