I would offer the following:
Rather than look at extremes (e.g., Fred's "What about Kabul?"), let's
look at other "second tier" options, like Bangkok, Prague, Cairo (well,
maybe off the radar for the next few months), or Mexico City, to pick
well-connected, well-airported, rather inexpensive, cities on every
continent.
Let me relate my *EXPERIENCE* with some interim meetings (lemonade). [I
suppose data is the closest we have to 'working code.'] Meeting held in
Dallas: 9 participants. Meeting held in Vancouver: 10 participants.
Meeting held in London: 14 participants. Meeting held in Beijing: 21
participants.
Worst Internet connectivity: London.
Best Internet connectivity: tied between Vancouver and Beijing.
Best participation by people (well, person) who absolutely refuse to
travel: Vancouver.
Second best participation by people who have difficulty to travel:
London.
Most new document authors and reviewers netted from meeting: Beijing.
Our interim meetings always have strong remote participation, as some
people in our work group cannot travel at all. We do a lot of Jabber,
iChat, and conference bridges with access numbers local or toll-free for
most of the participants. The biggest problem with the Beijing meeting
was the 12-15 hour differential for U.S. remote participants. The
biggest benefit was expanding the protein.
-----Original Message-----
From: John C Klensin [mailto:john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com]
Sent: Saturday, July 15, 2006 11:53 PM
To: Brian E Carpenter; patrick(_at_)isoc(_dot_)lu
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Meetings in other regions
--On Saturday, July 15, 2006 6:36 PM +0200 Brian E Carpenter
<brc(_at_)zurich(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com> wrote:
Patrick,
It may have got lost in this thread, but Fred has got the nub
of
the argument here: the IETF's goal is to do its work as
efficiently
as possible, and that means assembling at locations that are
(on some sort of average) convenient for our active
participants.
In practical terms, that means assembling in countries or
regions
with a good number of current participants.
It also means such things as:
* picking places within those countries or regions that have
good airports with easy (and multiple) international
connections. Even San Diego is a little marginal in that
regard. Based on experience in the last year or so, I'd
suggest that Cape Town and Marrakech (suggested in another
posting) should be utterly disqualified (although J-berg and
Casablanca are more plausible on this dimension).
* picking places where we can be assured of adequate, and
rock-solid, connectivity at both the meeting site and, if
different, the hotel(s). That ought to be easy, but we
aren't there yet. When I was in Marrakech (at an ICANN
meeting) a few weeks ago, we lost the network multiple times
due to difficulties with the international link and
insufficient backup/ alternate path bandwidth (see below).
There were also some problems that, in principle (but not in
practice) could have been fixed or avoided locally, but an
international link outage from a remote location can easily
be a showstopper. Similarly, while last week's meeting was
superb in many respects, the condition of the network in the
Delta was effective at preventing many of us from working
overnight... whether to catch up on day job activities or to
work on drafts, the impact is reduced productivity and, to
some degree, an incentive to stay home rather than attend
meetings.
My own view, even if it is not politically correct, is that IETF
should leave the outreach to exotic places to ISOC, ICANN, and
others. I'm very much in favor of our continuing to meet in
some proportionate way in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific -- and
other places if we have adequate participation. But let's stick
to the places from which we have adequate participation and
where we can run an efficient meeting with efficient transport
to and from the location. The theory that we should go to
places to stimulate participation from those places really does
not work: our real work requires extensive read-in, not just
skimming a few documents and going to a newcomer's orientation
(if that). The people from remote places whom we want to have
participate in person should already be participating via
mailing lists.
The model underlying the pie chart is a little weak in that
regard, since it shows meeting attendance rather than
participation. Perhaps we should be looking to ways to measure
participation that counts effective mailing list participants so
as to increase the priority of the places from which they come.
But going to a place that is difficult for most participants to
get to, with network performance and availability that is hard
to predict in advance, in the hope of getting more useful
participation from that area, strikes me as yet another way to
shoot ourselves in the foot.
Outreach is important, and welcoming new active contributors
is important, but the dominant consideration is a location that
is convenient and effective for our current active
contributors
Yes, and that brings me to....
Patrick Vande Walle wrote:
The place where we had the ICANN meeting in Marrakech
provided fast connectivity, very good mobile phone coverage
and all you would need for a productive meeting, despite the
fact that it was located in Africa.
Interesting. We either have different criteria or were at
different meetings. Let's ignore the 802.11 network, which
frequently became unusable apparently due to causes one could
have experienced anywhere. I saw the audio stream to outside
locations collapse several times, the international links suffer
outages that took some time to resolve, and so on. Until ICANN
staff managed to cut the hotel network over into the meeting
network, the hotel network and its provisioning arrangements
were completely swamped by ICANN participants (and that type of
cutover arrangement can't always be worked out on short notice)
I don't have hard data, but my subjective impression from
listening to people complain is that the meeting may have set a
record for lost luggage in recent years. I'd love to go back
there on vacation, but it is not a place I can recommend holding
a meeting that is strongly dependent on good quality Internet
connections with 100% uptime.
This is a counter
example to what your are trying to demonstrate.
Unfortunately, it is an example, not a counter-example.
There are
many places places in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America
where you could have a productive meeting. One only needs to
look for them.
Sure. But if one needs the types of facilities and connectivity
that IETF needs, I think you are underestimating the
difficulties of the search... and of being sure one has the
right place and facilities once one finds them.
It is more in terms of interacting with the local
community to find out what they expect to come out of a
standardization process.
But changing that requires a level of outreach to which the IETF
has not aspired. See my comments about existing participants
above. Think about how much "interacting with the local
community" we did in Montreal. Remember the comments made in
Marrakech that ICANN wasn't doing main sessions in French or
Arabic and contemplate the costs, delays, and difficulty of
parallel translation of IETF materials.
The hypothesis by which whatever is
good for the Northern hemisphere is automatically fine for
the rest of the world seems slightly colonialist to me.
Such a hypothesis would be very unattractive if anyone had it or
offered it. But, in the time I've been around the IETF, I have
never heard such a thing suggested in seriousness.
And, to save writing an extra note just for this...
--On Saturday, July 15, 2006 6:00 AM -0400 JORDI PALET MARTINEZ
<jordi(_dot_)palet(_at_)consulintel(_dot_)es> wrote:
Definitively there are several countries: Spain, Mexico,
Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama.
Ok, this discussion just passed over into the unreal. I assume
that one reason we have been meeting increasingly in Canada
(Vancouver last fall, Montreal now) is because it is getting
harder for some active participants to get visa to come to the
US. So let's site a meeting in a place where it is illegal for
those holding US passports to travel and in which it might be
illegal to bring in the equipment needed to run the meeting.
Remember that percentage of draft authors from another posting?
Want the IESG to attend? Some of the other countries on that
list are plausible if the right city is chosen. Others... well,
see my comments about connectivity above. Those work if our
purpose is to show that we hold meetings in such places. If the
purpose is to get work done, no possible way.
best,
john
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