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Re: Legality of IETF meetings in PRC. Was: Re: Request for community guidance on issue concerning a future meeting of the IETF

2009-10-11 16:47:21



On Sun, 11 Oct 2009, Doug Ewell wrote:

I'd suggest reading your posts again.

And I suggest you read the original message that started the whole 
discussion again, let me quote the relevant section:

"The members of the IAOC, speaking as individuals, do not like this
 condition as a matter of principle. The IAOC does believe that this
 condition would not prevent the IETF from conducting its business."

I signed up to that statement before it was sent out. And yes, I
have been speaking as an individual which I think it's OK to do
since no final decisions have been made.


It's fine with me if you believe on an individual level that the 
risks are low, that the rules won't be enforced for some reason or 
that people will happily refrain from potentially risky subject 
matter, or that nobody will mount an intentional DoS attack against 
IETF by unfurling a banner and letting the hotel finish the job for 
them.  But if you post this, I believe it should be clearly marked 
as an individual opinion, because leaving it unclear whether this is 
your opinion as IETF Trustee is incompatible with asking the 
question and tallying the results without bias.

Really? How do you reconcile that with Marshall's statement? We're 
asking if the community can "live with" the clause as currently 
provided. We don't (or didn't at the time to be accurate) believe that 
the clause itself would prevent us from having a successful meeting 
there. But we asked for community input. The data collected (from the 
survey and from comments) is what we will use to further analyze the 
situation. Do we still believe what we belived when he sent out the 
message? I can't tell you because we have not discussed it in detail 
yet, but the whole point was to collect this information from the 
community. Obviously, at some level, it does not really matter WHY 
someone might not want to attend a meeting in China, if the number is 
large we're not going to have a successful meeting by our usual 
definition. The survey and comments tells us something about that, 
some of it as a direct result of the questions, some of it as "side 
effects".

And: a lot of OTHER issues have also been brought into focus as a 
result of these discussions, and all of it is good input to our 
decision making process. It ALSO provides a written record of the 
community's feelings on this meeting, something I expect will become 
really useful if further negotiations on contract terms procede.

As for


(And one more time: I agree that the contract clause is unacceptable, at
least if taken literally).

How can it not be taken literally?  As I said in my other post, individuals
can choose to ignore the speed limit signs and drive as fast as they want, but
the organization cannot.


I understand your point, but "taken literally" can mean different 
things to different readers. It's not worth debating this any further
since we already agree that the best thing would be to get rid of
the clause so I suggest we move on and see what can be accomplished
in that regard.

Cheers,

Ole
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