Re: Meetings in other regions

[Fred Baker <fred at cisco.com>]

On Jul 14, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> Try taking the overall NA data, and removing the NA people; the  
> remaining data should be relatively unbiased (e.g. the Asia/Europe  
> ratio should be fairly close to the "actual" value). Do the same  
> for the European and Asian meetings, only there remove the  
> respective "local" numbers (i.e. European and Asian). Judicious  
> comparison of results should give you a pretty close values for the  
> true overall NA/European/Asian ratios.

OK, so I have just gone through an analysis of this. Like any good  
researcher, I started with a simplifying assumption and then  
criticized my own assumptions.

Assumption: if a person is from a country, when they list their home  
address, they will list the country. So I can look for names of  
countries.

Criticism: US folks don't do that. They do well to get a two letter  
postal identifier in for their state. Mea Culpa. So the results one  
gets from this analysis will not reflect US population. (note: I did  
find 61 I-Ds that listed that the person was from the United States.)

Criticism: I found two internet drafts that take it upon themselves  
to list countries - one of them appears to try to list all of the  
countries in the world.

Criticism: "Aruba Networks" is a company. "Chad" is a common name for  
men. Atlanta is in "Georgia". And so on.

Assumption: the "we" in question is folks who post internet drafts.  
Attendance at an IETF meeting or being on the mailing list doesn't  
qualify for consideration here.

Criticism: there are SO many ways to approach that one. This is the  
assumption I made for this analysis. So there.

So I wound up putting a bit of work into this. If you don't like my  
analysis, do your own analysis :-)


I started from the Wikipedia list of countries. This is a very good  
article, BTW: it lists about 253 regions and peoples that think of  
themselves as countries whether anyone else thinks so or not,  
including self-ruled regions of Denmark (Greenland), Islands  
protected by nations (Guam, the Falklands), Cities that act a lot  
like countries (Hong Kong), people groups that don't like other  
people groups they live with (Palestine), and so on.

Basically, I assumed that if someone said they lived or worked at  
some address in a named place, they probably did.

Criticism: I know of some people who probably don't know where they  
live. I fly more than some of them :-)

By my analysis, the people that are involved in the IETF claim in  
Internet Drafts to have mailing addresses in: United States, Germany,  
France, Finland, Canada, Japan, China, Belgium, Sweden, Korea, United  
Kingdom, Israel, India, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Norway,  
Australia, Netherlands, Ireland, Hungary, Singapore, Portugal,  
Turkey, Bulgaria, Denmark, Taiwan, Argentina, Egypt, Poland, Hong  
Kong, Venezuela, Croatia, New Zealand, Syria, Sudan, Romania,  
Lebanon, Mongolia, Greece, Thailand, or Costa Rica. Yes, there is an  
order to that list - the countries at the beginning have a lot of I- 
Ds posted, and the ones at the tail have one I-D posted.


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