On 11/10/2012 10:38 AM, Arturo Servin wrote:
When I said "the ietf thinks" I reefer about the consciousness of the
IETF as a group.
I know, I'm just not really sure it has one. I think that
there's enormous diversity among the reasons people participate
and what it is they hope to get done.
I disagree with you about meeting location as a factor "openness". I
think that it is an important one to consider.
I think there's a lot of value in sharing the travel pain, but
I'm not sure that "openness" is one of them. I'm actually pretty
sure it's not. If you're not participating because travel is
onerous and you would participate if a meeting were held closer,
what happens when the meeting goes back to being held someplace
inconvenient four months later? I'm certainly not arguing against
holding meetings in a wider range of places and going to countries/
continents we haven't in the past, but rather I'm concerned about
misplaced emphasis on meetings both as some sort of metric of
accessibility and as the mechanism for getting things done.
The IETF works by progressing documents. Writing documents, reviewing
documents, editing documents - these things don't require meeting
participation, and indeed I'd suggest that requiring meeting
participation, either by fiat or by implication, would work to
reduce openness, discourage participation from both people working
as individuals and people working for small companies, etc., and
is likely to reduce the diversity of the participant pool while
effectively hiding IETF process by pulling it off mailing lists. I'd
rather that didn't happen, and that has nothing to do with meeting
location.
Melinda