At 06:30 AM 3/28/2001, John C Klensin wrote:
>Subject to constraints of invitations and practicality, part of
Continued reliance on invitations and hosts ensure several problems.
One is that we tend to lock in a location one year later than we
should. Should be 2 years, and we tend to run no better than 1. That
constrains choice and that either increases price or decreases convenience.
Another is that the host is usually not skilled at the relevant technical
details for a conference. Usually the host compensates by throwing massive
money or staff at the problem; usually that is sufficient. With
regularity, it is not.
If we are serious about trying to optimize the meeting in terms of cost,
reliability and convenience, we need to choose a standard set of extremely
convenient (and less expensive) locations and then keep using them.
Re-use reduces learning curve and that reduces problems (and cost).
>the plan has been to do this statistically. I.e., when 2/3 of
>the active participants are from outside the USA, I assume we
As I believe Randy Bush pointed out, the flaw in this analytic methodology
is that a meeting in the US is an unequal barrier to participation from
outside the US. I'm not "voting" for changing the current proportion of
US/non-US meetings, but do feel compelled to note the danger in using
history as the basis for deciding the future.
>* There are many places which, were we to hold meetings in them,
>would set off concerns about junketing and tourism of other
>sorts. Many organizations have rules about "conventions" which
>IETF escapes but which would get invoked if we started a regular
>tour of known tourist locations in season.
On the average, IETF decisions are best made when they focus on the primary
concerns of a situation and not on the ever-present mass of other issues.
Worrying about possible rules that some organizations might have is like
worrying about national encryption laws. It's distracting and reduces the
quality of our product. We clearly made the right choice to ignore
national variation in security laws.
We should equally ignore all but the essential factors in making meeting
logistics "optimal". My own view is that optimal is determined by access
convenience (international hub), cost, and reliability of networking and
presentation services.
Three factors are more than enough the try to optimize.
The rest need to be ignored.
If we are serious about the issues that cause complaints about IETF meeting
logistics.
d/
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Dave Crocker <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel: +1.408.246.8253; fax: +1.408.273.6464
