On May 27, 2016, at 12:17 PM, Donald Eastlake <d3e3e3(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>
wrote:
The policy was very simply to hold meetings to roughly equalize the
travel burden on the people who were actually attending the meetings.
It had nothing to do with diversity. Asia was added to the rotation,
first as one out of 5 (2-2-1) and then as one out of 3 (1-1-1) after
Asia attendance actually increased, NOT due to any sort of diversity
policy or marketing effort. I think that was a good policy, one
oriented to getting work done. Buenos Aires was a stark exception to
this policy.
This matches my understanding as well. We started going to Asia because it
wasn’t fair that the Asian participants (who were _already actively
participating_) were shouldering a larger travel burden than attendees from
North America and Europe.
Before we regularly start traveling to other regions of the world on a regular
basis as a means of increasing the geographical diversity of our attendees, i
would like to see two things happen:
(1) I would like us to use Buenos Aires as an experiment and actually track how
many of the local first-time attendees continue to be active participants
(write to mailing lists, author drafts, attend other meetings in person or
remotely) over the next 6-to-12 months, so that we can see if traveling to a
new region of the world actually works to recruit more participants from that
area.
(2) Discuss, within the IETF, whether the costs of doing this (financial and
logistical) are worth the benefits, AFTER we know what those benefits are from
completing step 1.
Margaret