In message <51A4E625(_dot_)3020406(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>, Melinda Shore writes:
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?
Adelaide is a small city. If you were picking Australian cities
to promote local interaction Adelaide would be the 4th-6th city
you would choose. Melboure, Sydney and Brisbane are the top 3
with some debate about the order.
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
--
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka(_at_)isc(_dot_)org