On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 2:15 PM, Melinda Shore
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 5/28/13 6:20 AM, Christian O'Flaherty wrote:
Probably, this lack of social interaction in our region is one of
the main reasons for low participation. Most of latin american
IETFers are currently living outside the region and they engaged in
the IETF when living in the US or Europe. It's difficult to be
involved when no one else around is working in it or think it doesn't
fit well in their current work. A physical meeting will help to
"demystify" the IETF, making it "accesible" from a professional
perspective.
Any sense of why that didn't happen with Australians after
the Adelaide meeting?
If we're able to get a "proportional growth" similar to what happened
in Australia it will be a success :-)
Latam is a region with 600 million inhabitants compared to 23 million
in Australia.
But I agree with you and I'm not saying a meeting is going to be
enough. In the past it was probably not combined with other activities
planned two or three years in advance. We can do something serious
here and we know the potential available in the region to empower the
IETF even more.
Christian
I'm not opposed to meeting in South America but there have
been an awful lot of assertions about this or that happening
if we do, without a lot of supporting evidence. History,
unfortunately, doesn't support many of these assertions, and
I think beating the meeting location question to death is
at least some small distraction from trying to get at the core
issues.
For whatever it's worth, I was participating on IETF mailing lists
well before attending a meeting. Granted, I'm a native English
speaker and wasn't dealing with that as an issue but probably
more to the point was that there was work going on in the IETF
that directly impacted work I was doing myself.
Melinda