Also, if you live in a country with censorship, or with low bandwidth, it's
possible that the only way to attend an IETF meeting will be in person.
It would be nice if there were a bright line to draw on one side of which
is total inclusiveness, but there is not. We need to make both kinds of
meeting work.
What Stephen said is right--the IAOC needs to systematically, rather than
informally, analyze what it is that needs to be done in confidence, and
expose the rest to public view. I know this is non-trivial, and I do not
say this in the spirit of bashing the IAOC, who work very hard for us with
little reward other than our complaining.
If I were on the IAOC right now, I would be thinking about how to get off
of it. I've been in the situation of having what seemed like a big chunk
of the IETF upset at me, and it's pretty soul-crushing. Nevertheless, I
think what Stephen proposes is the thing the IAOC can do that is most
likely to prevent future woe of this kind.
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 8:17 AM, Yoav Nir
<ynir(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 11 Apr 2016, at 1:45 PM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk(_at_)gsp(_dot_)org> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 08:05:19AM +0000, Andrew Allen wrote:
We could be left with the only possible venue being a cruise ship
sailing in international waters - [snip]
There is another alternative -- one I've raised repeatedly.
Don't have physical meetings. Then this entire problem space simply
vanishes, along with the need for a discusion thread that's now over a
hundred messages. (And it's not the first one.) YES, it's replaced by a
different problem space, which roughly works out to "how can everything
be done virtually?" but given that this is the *Internet* engineering
task force I have no doubt that the collective expertise is more than
capable of dealing with that.
I don’t believe that this technology exists. People have been singing the
praise of Meetecho in IETF 95, and yet remote participation is nothing like
being in the room. And the “virtual interim” meetings are nothing like
physical meetings. There is a reason why airlines make great money from
business travel and don’t shut down for the winter.
Particularly if all the discussion, effort,
and expense going into the logistics of physical meetings is redirected
into virtual ones instead.
Yeah, perhaps, some day when we’re all wearing virtual reality headsets
and our avatars are hanging out in a virtual venue, and we all have
sufficient equipment and bandwidth to handle all that. We’re not there yet.
I really can't take any of the platitudes about "inclusion" seriously
until that happens -- because as long as the IETF persists with physical
meetings, most people *will* be excluded due to cost, distance, time,
legal climate, personal safety, etc. The IETF is, even if accidentally,
selecting for the elite few who are fortunate enough to be attend.
Virtual meetings with the technology we have today makes it very hard for
people with mediocre English to follow the discussion. The “I don’t quite
follow what you’re saying” look does not translate well to the kind of
video we can use today. That extends even to people with relatively good
English (for non-native speakers) like me.
Yoav