Subject: Consultation on changes to the IETF meeting venue identification and selection process

From: IETF Executive Director <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 15:49:34 +1300

The IETF Administration LLC is planning to make some changes to the process it uses to identify and select venues for IETF meetings.  The intent is to improve the process without changing how we assess venues, which will continue to follow the guidelines in RFC 8718 [1].

The planned changes to the venue identification and selection process are:

* Explain clearly all the steps

* Provide clarity on who/how venues can be recommended.

* Providing a clear path for venues and their agents to recommend their own venue and provide us the details we need to assess them.  This already happens but in an unstructured and time consuming way.

* Require IETF participants who want to recommend a venue to fill out a form explaining why they think this city is suitable and providing some basic details based on their first-hand knowledge.  Assessing cities/venues is a very time consuming process.  Utilising local knowledge in this way ensures that we get high quality input from the start and minimises the time we spend assessing unsuitable cities/venues.

The new process is below and on the following GitHub repository:

    https://github.com/ietf-llc/venue-identification-and-selection-process-consultation

We welcome any feedback before Sunday 15 November.

--
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email-masked]

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# IETF MEETING VENUE IDENTIFICATION AND SELECTION PROCESS

## Step 1 - Recommendation

The first step in the selection process is an initial recommendation 
of a city and/or a specific venue in that city

### Cities within the IETF meeting regions

If the city is within one of the three IETF meeting regions (North America, 
Asia, Europe) you can make a recommendation in one of two ways:

* If you are a participant then fill out the "Venue Recommendation 
  (Participants)" [2] form and send that to [email-masked].

* If you are a venue or an agent for a venue then fill out the "Venue 
  Recommendation (Venues and Agents)" [3] form and send that to 
  [email-masked].

Additionally the IETF LLC solicits recommendations directly from 
Global Hosts and self-recommends countries and cities within the three 
regions that it thinks may be suitable.

### Cities outside of the IETF meeting regions

For countries or cities outside of the three meeting regions the process 
in RFC 8719 [4] for an exploratory meeting needs to be followed:

* You must write to the IETF discussion list [email-masked] with your 
  proposal for the IETF to meet in a specific city or country.  You 
  will need to explain why you are making the proposal and seek 
  support from other IETF participants.

* If the IETF Chair decides there is consensus to consider the proposal 
  then they inform the IETF LLC.  

* The IETF LLC will then work with you to identify cities to take to 
  step 2.  You will be asked to fill out the "Venue Recommendation 
  (Participants)" [2]  form for each of the cities that goes to step 2.

## Step 2 - Initial Assessment

Once a recommendation has been accepted, the IETF LLC carries out an 
initial assessment by remotely researching the city and any potential 
venues in that city.  The output of this step is a report that assesses 
if the city is likely to meet or not meet the requirements and a 
recommendation on whether or not to consider the city any further.

## Step 3 - Community Feedback

We then seek community feedback on the assessment report and 
recommendation.  This feedback is assessed and published in a public 
repository [5].  Depending on the feedback received, we may advance the 
city to the next step, or return to step 2 and conduct further remote 
research, or we may reject the city and update the Meeting Location 
Assessment table [6].

## Step 4 - Detailed Assessment

Once a city passes the community feedback step, we carry out the 
detailed assessment, which may take some years to complete.  This 
includes the following steps:

* Site visits to specific venues undertaken by the meetings team and 
  NOC members to assess the facilities and the network.

* Detailed cost discussions with venues.

* Initial discussions with secondary hotels.

* Discussions with any local tourism or convention bureau on possible 
  support packages.

We may choose not to follow up with a specific city at this stage for a
number of reasons, such as all the venues are too expensive or unable 
to meet our network requirements or not available for our required 
dates.  Depending on the reason for not following up we may update the 
Meeting Location Assessment table or it may continue to show this as a 
potential location.

## Step 5 - IETF LLC Board Approval

The IETF LLC board is then asked to approve the venue location based on
a detailed confidential information pack.

## Step 6 - Contracting

Once the IETF LLC board has approved a venue, the final contracts are 
agreed and signed.

## Step 7 - Community Notification

Once the contracts are signed and we are committed to the venue, we 
notify the community and update the upcoming meetings [7] page.

----

[1]  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8718
[2]  https://github.com/ietf-llc/venue-identification-and-selection-process-consultation/blob/main/IETF_Venue_Recommendation_Form_(IETF_Participant).pdf
[3]  https://github.com/ietf-llc/venue-identification-and-selection-process-consultation/blob/main/IETF_Venue_Recommendation_Form_(Venues_and_Agents).pdf
[4]  https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8719#section-4
[5]  https://trello.com/b/whq8I098/venue-selection-input
[6]  https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/planning/meeting-location-input/
[7]  https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/upcoming/