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Optimizing for what? Was Re: IETF Attendance by continent

2010-08-30 14:58:02

The recent remark on bias against individuals[*] made me think about weighing 
the location preference by number of participants from certain regions.

Suppose an individual from Asia attends all IETFs then her costs are that for 
attending 6 IETFs she gets to travel 1x regional and 5x interregional. 

While an individual from the US travels 3x regional and 3x interregional. 
Clearly there is a bias agains our Asian colleague in with respect of the costs.

Using participation/contribution numbers to weigh locations minimizes the 
global costs (total amount of miles flown, carbon spend, lost hours by the 
collective, total amount of whining) but nothing of that flows back to the 
individual engineer that attends every time.

If you want to be fair to the individual participants you have to optimize in 
such a way that attending 6 meetings costs the same for every individual that 
regularly attends the IETF. Obviously one can only approximate that by putting 
fairly large error bars on the costs but isn't the X-Y-Z distribution where X= 
approx Y= approx Z  the closest optimum? (or finding one place that sucks 
equally for everybody)

Am I missing something? 

--Olaf (strictly personal)

[*] Independent consultants, somebody not financially backed up by big 
corporations.


________________________________________________________ 

Olaf M. Kolkman                        NLnet Labs
                                       Science Park 140, 
http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/               1098 XG Amsterdam

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