--On Friday, December 18, 2015 21:31 +0000 "Fred Baker (fred)"
<fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
Let me ask a question. I'm on the IAOC Meetings committee,
which is an advisory committee that does some research (with
AMS) and makes a recommendation to Ray, which he then takes to
the IAOC. The IAOC sometimes agrees with us and sometimes
doesn't. You will have just seen a note from Ray on this
mailer detailing the IAOC's objectives in meeting planning;
our committee, with strong involvement from AMS, does the
investigative legwork to try to achieve those.
Fred,
I'm in general agreement with Andrew and several other comments,
but want to reinforce two of them.
First, we seem to be seeing an increase in virtual interim
meetings even in the last four or five years. I don't know
whether that marks a change in the way the IETF does business
and the people who are attending (although I suspect it does)
nor do I know if there is any correlation between f2f plenary
meetings that are far away or expensive for some key
participants in some WGs and that increase or if it is due
entirely to other factors. There are also considerable efforts
to make remote participation (as distinct from remote lurking)
more plausible. To the extent to which they succeed, it may
have a side-effect of reducing the odds that someone who only
participates in one or two WGs will travel to the IETF meeting
site.
Quite independent of factors we cannot predict [1], those
factors suggest a very strong possibility of major changes in
just a few years, much less than nine or more.
Second, I've heard a great deal of unrest about claims of
inability to make changes in meeting arrangements because those
arrangements are already set three years out. Sometimes that
even seems to take the form of "we can't do that for the next
meeting, N+1, because it is within the three year window and we
can't do it for meeting N+10 because it it too far away to think
about". Creating that situation for 27 meetings into the
future, with or without the sort of changes suggested by the
above, seems to be a recipe for the sense of an unresponsive and
unaccountable system that upsets the IETF community (whether
there is a substantive problem or not).
Part of that problem is a sense that the IAOC (and the meetings
committee) have been less than forthcoming with the community
about what is going on and what decisions are being made and
why. Ray's note lists multiple criteria that we all know tend
to conflict but does not identify priorities. That is
reasonable in some ways, problematic in others, especially if
one believes those decisions should be made by the community
rather than a small cluster of people in secret. At the other
ends of the process, BCP 101 appears to require that contracts
(with no exclusion for hotel contracts) be posted, albeit with
commercially-sensitive details redacted. My recollection is
that we were promised for some years that would be done, but it
hasn't been... and the hotel category doesn't even appear on the
IAOC contracts page.
It seems to me that your idea improves on that situation in some
ways but also vastly increases the potential for a plausible
perception of abuse (or at least a completely non-transparent
process).
So, while I think that stabilizing on a small number of
locations would be a good idea, especially if we can get more
favorable arrangements as a result, I think nine years is much
too long... and that even three years may be too long unless it
comes with a plan from the IAOC about how to make the whole
system more obviously transparent and responsive.
john
[1] On the "unpredictable" scale, I'd hate to be the IAOC if
there were another significant industry crash that brought about
very significant pressures on travel budgets and a significant
drop in attendance for several years if one had firm hotel
contracts with large block commitments many years out.