All agreed, but we currently pick locations based on geographic locality to
participants - maybe picking them based on visa availability for
participants might be more useful?
I doubt that's going to be a productive route. For people who live in
the US, Canada, EU, Japan, Australia, and NZ, all those countries
allow citizens of all of the others to travel without a visa,
requiring at most an online un-visa (US and Australia.) Beyond that,
the rules are all over the place. The US has soms unfortunate rules
(good luck if you have a Cuban or Iranian passport) but even a normal
visa often takes months if the consulate in the visitor's country is
backed up. We might find a small country that has relaxed visa rules,
but was more expensive to get to, the overall number of people who
came might well be less.
Opening the registration earlier seems like something that wouldn't be
very hard to do, and would be a boon to people who need visas. By way
of comparison, ICANN's next meeting is in February, and the
registration has been open for a couple of weeks.
R's,
John
PS: Wait until you see what the un-visa for Argentina involves.