On May 28, 2013, at 8:46 AM, Eric Burger
<eburger(_at_)standardstrack(_dot_)com> wrote:
Riiight. That is why one never has to attend an IETF meeting in person to
serve on NOMCOM, one does not need travel support from one's employer to be
on the IESG, and why people who never come to IETF meetings are the rule and
not the exception with respect to getting documents adopted and published.
The IETF has a big problem, IMHO, in that effective participation really does
currently seem to require meeting attendance. There's a reason that nomcom
members have to show up—if they didn't, they wouldn't be part of the actual
culture of IETF, because so much IETF culture is bound up in the physical
meetings.
The interaction we get in the physical meetings is really important. I would
very much like to see the IETF try to discover new ways of using the technology
our forebears (and some remaining senior participants) invented to achieve the
same effectiveness without requiring us to all burn tons of fuel getting to
remote corners of the globe.
But "achieve the same effectiveness" is an important requirement for any such
new solution. And right now we don't have a solution like that, so we do what
we do, and you are right that that means that effective participation in the
IETF is much easier for people who are able to attend at least a sufficiency of
meetings on an ongoing basis. We should see this as a starting point, not as
an end state.