--On Thursday, April 13, 2017 11:42 -0700 Dave Taht
<dave(_dot_)taht(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
I find meetecho to have evolved to being an effective tool,
and no longer intend to attend ietf meetings in person. I'll
miss the beer, company and cookies; won't miss the travel and
hotel hassles.
I'm not quite at the point of "never", although Chicago was my
first f2f meeting in a few years.
However, even weighting the beer, company, and cookies in, I
think you identify another factor that the IAOC should consider
and that may affect the present discussion and especially the
short-term changes in policies, practices, or facilities: I
think it is likely that, over time, more people will follow your
lead in not finding f2f attendance at particular meetings
critical and, in particular, in not attending meeting that
appear to them, perhaps not long before the registration
deadline, to be more trouble then they are worth. Could that
result in reduced attendance in July 2018? Sure, although
probably not as much reduced as Michael's "local west coast
attendees" prediction. But suppose that, by then, US border
policies have stabilized back to around the 2015 status quo
(plus or minus some ongoing ranting that people might have
learned to ignore by then), UK policies are in a state of some
disarray a year into the Brexit transition, and a non-trivial
number of people find Singapore inappropriate because of issues
discussed at great length on this list and/or a bit expensive
for their tastes or budgets. That combination of scenarios --
none of them especially far-fetched -- with those of us who like
to get to a meeting occasionally even if we expect to be remote
most of the time plus locals looking in to see what IETF is
about (IIR, we've had a large number of those in previous
meetings in the Bay Area and down the peninsula) could easily
lead to a larger-than-expected attendance in San Francisco (even
if the IAOC has already estimated the last factor and included
it in their estimates).
That is a really bad game to play, especially if one remembers
how restive the community gets when meeting rooms are too small
for WG attendees to get into them.
While I think it is less likely than that US policies 15 months
hence will be a lot closer to where they were a year ago than to
what Trump tried to put into effect in January, were changes to
occur in Singapore that would result in visa requirements for
everyone and requirements to indicate religion and sexual
preferences on applications, previous discussions on this list
would imply that meeting would be, IMO, in a _lot_ more trouble
than we can anticipate for San Francisco.
And that, again without underestimating the difficulties or
costs of meeting cancellations, moves, etc., brings me rather
quickly back to "can't predict what will happen nearly well
enough to make finely-tuned plans wrt either countries or cities
within those countries on the basis of immigration/ travel/ or
border policies" so the most useful strategy is the general
policies we've been following, with as much flexibility for
unpredictable fluctuations in attendance vis-a-vis projections
as we can get. Either that or, in the hope that we can predict
that far in advance (which might not be true), we just stop
trying to set meeting locations more than a year in advance with
whatever that implies about choices, costs, conflicts and
disruption (including probably needing to cancel some meetings,
or at least move dates around, because we can't otherwise find a
place to meet). Probably can't have it both ways.
john