Re: A couple of meta points -- IETF 100, Singapore, onwards

On Wed, 25 May 2016, John C Klensin wrote:

> Ole,
>
> Since we seem to be waxing philosophical here, three complementary 
> rhetorical questions:
>
> (1) The easiest place for Chinese citizens to attend a meeting, with 
> a guarantee of no visa problems, is (obviously) China.  A corollary 
> to our question above is that we should be holding additional 
> meetings in China (some "somewhere in Asia that might be relatively 
> friendly to Chinese passport holders").  How would you balance that 
> reason for planning more meetings in China against the disadvantages 
> of doing so, disadvantages that include uncertainty about visas for 
> others (see below), air quality issues, questions about availability 
> of open networks (at least for attendees staying in other than the 
> official hotel and possibly for the general population), etc.?  
> Note that inverting that question turns into exactly your question 
> above about very large numbers of US and Canadian attendees versus 
> visa issues.
As you know, last time we went to China it was only after a long 
debate, and as such I would expect us to have a similar debate
if it happened again for all the reasons you list. Since all of those
issues (including in-bound visas) affect every non-local attendee,
I would expect the community to come to a go or no-go decision based
in part by the perceived number of people negatively affected.

I don't have any comments on your other points.

Ole
 
>      john
>
>
> [1] "Unpleasant" including high fees, requirements to schedule
> f2f interviews, long lead times, general discourtesy, demands
> for unreasonable levels of documentation, and general "you need
> to prove your innocence beyond any plausible doubt" behavior. 
>
> [2] For the record, I've been timed out on an application for a
> Chinese visa after getting several of them before and after.  I
> have every reason to believe that the main reasons was someone's
> (or some institution's) idea of reciprocity.   But timeouts for
> US passport-holders trying to go to China are not a theoretical
> issue (fwiw, I've also been timed out by Brazil -- nothing
> unique about China or the US-China relationship).