On Fri, 20 Jul 2012, Behcet Sarikaya wrote:
I don't understand why this issue is coming up.
Maybe you don't know, IETF 84 falls in the month of Ramadan for
Muslims and nobody asked to change it?
I think focusing on the religious roots of the holiday is misguided.
The question is what effect the holiday is likely to have on meeting
attendance. I think the IETF also tries to avoid secular holidays
that would interfere with the attendance of a large number of typical
IETF attendees.
Here's an example: we avoid the (secular) Thanksgiving holiday in the
US -- it falls on a Thursday in late November, and it's common for
people to take both the Thursday and Friday as holiday. Thanksgiving
is such a big deal in the US, and we get so many US attendees, that
the IETF would avoid that holiday no matter where the meeting was
being held.
Similarly, I think we would take into account local and regional
holidays at our meeting sites, both religious and secular. We would
probably avoid having a meeting in Amsterdam's center (or, really,
anywhere in the Netherlands) on Queen's Day.
Would overlapping with Easter draw down attendance enough to warrant
avoiding it? Probably. It's a big enough risk that shifting a week
seems sane.
While Ramadan is religiously very significant, I think it is observed
by relatively few of our regular meeting attendees and even those
that do observe it may be willing to travel during it. Hence the
difference in how they're being handled.
-- Sam