Ole,
On 9/15/2010 9:40 AM, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
As long as the prioritization of requirements is kept the way it is, yes, we
will regularly have these sorts of constraints on our choices.
No, this is actually regardless of what we prioritize for, assuming we
want major venues. The major venues of the world are not sitting
around waiting for us to call and book with them on our fixed dates.
I think I'm missing your point here.
It appears to be that we should not try to make the process and outcomes better
and more stable, because we can't make them perfect? Seriously, the pattern of
your responses appears primarily to indicate that we should not make any
changes, no matter what problems there are with the current scheme.
(I realize that you have explicitly said otherwise and that you repeat that
towards the end of this note. The problem is that your notes primarily focus on
making broad statements that serve to reject proposals, frequently based on
straw demands or expectations that were not made. It's really quite confusing.)
Availability is a major issue. Pick ANY major city in the world which
would satisfy your other requirements and see how far you get.
That they are not available forever misses the fact that they /are/ available.
It equally misses that there is an inventory of them. While it's certainly true
that they get reservered by others, it's also true that there is more than one
of them and that one well might be available to us.
This, of course, presumes that we follow a planning process that improves the
odds of our getting such places. It is, of course, possible to make sure that
we make choices which /preclude/ getting them. And it's pretty easy to argue
that that is exactly what we have been doing.
That's why we ended up in Hiroshima and not Tokyo (or Yokohama). I
We ended up in Hiroshima because we followed a process that locked us into Japan
and did this too late for us to have a choice on venue.
In other words, there are strategic problems with what we've been doing, so it
is inevitable that we will have significant tactical problems. The solution to
this is not to focus on the tactical problems in isolation, but to look harder
at the basic approach for site selection.
We should ask some simple questions, such as what criteria ensure a stable,
convenient, (relatively) inexpensive venue that reliably satisfies the needs of
an extremely diverse set of attendees, most of whom will be traveling long
distances and might not be experienced travelers? Then we should ask what
process will improve the odds of our satisfying these criteria?
The core answers appear to be that:
* We need to hold meetings in a few locations so that we can benefit from a
learning curve
* The locations need to be extremely resource-rich to satisfy the diversity
needs
* The locations need to be in dense, major transportation hubs. Dense
means that the resources are convenient. Major transportation hub means that
they are significantly more convenient to reach.
have a proposed fix which involves getting commitments from host (or
sponsors or insert entitity here) many years in advance, but even that
will take time to have an impact on reality.
That's a strategic approach, yes. But it also is almost certain to fail.
There are few organizations willing or able to make such expensive commitments
far enough in advance. That's one of the major reasons for de-coupling site
choice from funding.
Note that I am *still* very much in favor of having some small set of
regular venues and I do not consider the IETF an opportunity to
explore new places in the world (not much time to do that anyway
during IETF week), but having worked on this for a while I know what
the constraints are.
An appeal to authority is probably less helpful than one might wish, when
exploring strategic change in an open forum, with others who also have
significant experience. Your responses are not in the style of tradeoffs but of
rejection. That's not merely a case of offering insight from experience but of
rejecting proposals without acknowledging their benefits.
The fact that an alternative model will have constraints should be a given. The
discussion should be about the relative benefits and risks of alternative
approaches.
It doesn't mean things can't change, but it
probably means things cannot change overnight as some comments seem
to have implied.
Since no one has said anything about the rate of change, what is the relevance
of this comment? This is an example of asserting a straw condition that you
then use to undermine a proposal.
Please consider merely noting what a reasonable rate of change is, rather than
noting that it cannot be instantaneous.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf