MTGVENUE session Will talk about venue selection process document and policy document. Other documents: venue decisions and participant metrics. --------------------- Highlights and to-dos: Problem of moving meetings will be addressed in the documents Ask the mailing list about the disposition of Andrew and Alissa's draft Metrics document: double-check with working group on punting on this one until we've made more progress on the other deliverables, remind them that just because it wouldn't be worked on here doesn't mean it wouldn't be worked on at all --------------------- Selection process document (Fred Baker) - discussed at IETF 95 and on the mailing list - text incorporated, still a few more comments to add - would like to close the draft out - authors would like decisions document to be folded into this one; wg will discuss - other issues? Melinda: should the problem of moving meetings be discussed in the doc? Jonne: issue is that if we have to pull out for health or safety reasons, what criteria apply Ray: for BA, we considered whether it might have to be moved, and looked at a number of places and established a backup location. But there's a pivot point, beyond which you can't do that, a number of days beyond which you can't move it. Would have to cancel or have a virtual meeting instead. We're looking at backup locations for other meetings as well. Jonne: yes, but the question is whether this issue should be addressed in this document. Should there be a process and policies written down for it? Ray: it would be good to cover when the decision points are made Yoav: Do we really have a plan for actually having a virtual meeting? Can't do it without a plan. Jari: We do have a process for re-evaluating if we need to. Fred: We'd need to prototype a virtual meeting. Have a large-scale interim meeting to try it. Alissa: A couple of items on the list have no resolution yet. Should we discuss those now? What is the point of this draft?: People complain about issues such as "one roof"... but having a BCP that sets out policy can be a way of resolving complaints. Consensus on this draft could be very different from the ongoing complaint cycle. We need opinions that are not just from those who complain. Klensin: We did more a meeting, though not at the last minute: AP -> Vancouver. But not only does that community need to have plans for moving as a contingency, but a document like this needs to discuss the conditions and/or mechanisms for making the determination that is necessary. Ray: We've not moved a meeting after we had a contract. We moved Atlanta from 2010 to 2012 to make room for the Beijing meeting, but that was allowed by the contract. Crocker: During normal planning there have been changes made with respect to venues, and the staff know how to do that. But really interesting, difficult, and worth exploring: sudden, last-minute change (disaster, etc). The sense I get of having a virtual meeting is that we're not there yet. We need to plan for emergency procedures... but they also don't work if they never get used. Worth thinking about putting a substantial effort into planning and testing for such contingency. Tobias: [agrees] What's valuable for us is to understand the time points the community needs. What time points are good for you? 60 days? Or what? Nalini: We should have a backup plan. Mary Barnes: On the accessibility point: ADA covers invisible disabilities as well as visible ones. For example, food with respect to dietary restrictions. Has that factor been considered? Fred: Not the same standard worldwide. What we can say is that we would *prefer* a venue that meets US standards. Policy document (Suresh) - 1-1-1-* policy hasn't really been well defined; this draft does that, and aims to set out the goals for it. - - Distribute travel pain - - Distribute time zone pain for remote participants - - Attract new participants? - summarizes draft Open issues: 1. Should attracting new participants be a stated goal? 2. Do we need more precise definitions of geo regions? 3. Do we need to specify a mechanism to initiate the wildcard * proposals? 4. Should the reevaluation be periodic or need-based? Jari: Some differences between how we've been doing this and the draft. On the *, who proposes that? Also, the draft generalizes the concept of the *. Fred: On question 1: this perennially comes up. My question: does going to a new place actually result in people from that area staying in the IETF? Does it actually attract new participants? I think it did not do so when we went to Adelaide. Open question to Ray about the BA meeting -- how many from South America are here in Berlin? Let's not automatically assume that this works. As to question 2, more specific definition could work against us. Is Malta OK as Europe? Turkey? Morocco? Maybe close enough, maybe not. Crocker: On text "without extensively impacting the regular meetings", well, as an * meeting replaces a regular meeting, it's certainly an impact. Would be surprised if we were to add a fourth meeting to be an *. Suresh: Could do a virtual meeting between two regular meetings. Crocker: For writing general policy, that's too particular. [new topic] Also, language I like: We usually talk about "sharing the pain", but that's not concrete enough, and I like your separation of travel and time zone. We should add some language to go further on that. As we look at * situations and see ones that violate those goals, we might think harder. On the questions, #1 reduces to whether we should choose venues reactively or proactively. History has generally been reactive. China was reaction to an emerging trend. BA is the only one that seems proactive. We need to consider also the damage, as well as the hoped-for benefit -- such as reduced participation. We need to be careful in thinking about this. It's an appealing idea, but that doesn't mean it's right. Nalini: Collecting metrics for this very reason. The question has a lot of nuance. Ray: In Yokohama > 500 from Asia. In other geos, < 250. Other examples. Where we go has an impact on participation from the region. In BA, 600 people registered as remote participants, including hundreds from India. Here in Berlin, we have 200 remote registrants, including many from Latin America that we didn't have before. Alissa: Question 1, the draft that Andrew and I wrote gives an emphatic "no". Looking at the goals of the work we're doing, the work is much more important than the geographic locations. We should think about ways to help people all over the world contribute, but that doesn't necessary drive this policy. For Q2, locations have different aspects, including visas and such. Suresh: Region definition should not include that, but decisions will. Alissa: If we're just talking distance, arbitrary region boundaries don't make sense. For example, is Hawaii a reasonable compromise for distance? What about how easy it is to enter? Crocker: Ray's comments about local people... of course we get more local people, but we have to think about actual contributor. Locals may bring revenue, but we need to actually get work done. Klensin: [very similar comment] Fred: One doesn't show up at first IETF meeting and produce documents. There's a process over time. How many people who were new in BA are here this time? That's kind of the first step. Jari: Q2, I think we don't need a precise definition. Following up with Alissa, yes, distances and visas are different tradeoffs. This is a multidimensional problem, and we're trying to establish high-level principles here. We need to know how much participation from a region we need before considering it. Pete Resnick: On "process to become participant", we'd have to measure. But we can start measuring the inverse: see when new people started in relation to past meetings, and see if there's a correlation. Really comes down to people on mailing lists, and what caused them to do that. Article 19: Favouring the existing cohort. Need different perspectives that are reflective of the global Internet community. Christian: Agree with Pete on more complex measuring, but I don't agree with his conclusion. Not because of the meeting itself, but the process *before* the meeting, encouraging people over time, remote hubs, etc. Harald: BCP can say we need to measure, but actual measuring needs more flexibility. Jonne: Should we have more policy guidance about things such as the Singapore issue? People should think about that. Fred: It would be not helpful to try to have a list of such things, because it is by definition incomplete. We always have many tradeoffs and there's no perfect answer. Andrew/Alissa's document is trying to guide those tradeoffs, and that's useful. Melinda: What could be included in the documents that might have helped with the Singapore situation, and to help avoid these situations and deal with them when they happen. Fred: There are open conflicts: some people would like us to have a meeting in Africa, but most African countries have similar or worse (much worse) LGBT issues than Singapore. What's helpful is to have guidance in how to structure and investigate. Jonne: We could have a very long checklist and no possible venues. But this is a more complex issue than just geo consideration. Jari: Need to have geo policy. Need to have venue selection criteria -- Fred's doc, but need policy also. Need Andrew/Alissa document. And we need venue selection process. How these document needs are split is up to the WG. Alissa: One of the concerns with respect to our draft is that it'd be a shame if the community is happy but the IAOC has no better guidance for the controversial issues. But defining bright lines that will help... is very controversial. So can we write something down that really helps but doesn't inflame everyone and can get consensus. If we don't do something that helps the IAOC, we will not have been successful. I'd like to see us have a few locations we rotate among. Tobias: Practically, it'd be easy to have only a few locations, but that discriminates financially against those not in/near those locations. And also visa issues. We need to make the effort to allow everyone to come to meetings. Leslie: Strongly agree with Alissa's comments about guidance for the IAOC. IAOC never *intends* to surprise the community. This can't be a one-shot deal or it's not implementable. Things will always come up, and we need part of the process that can get more dynamic input from the community. Nalini: Need to figure out why mistakes are made. Lack of transparency was probably one problem. Think about why did the Singapore chaos happen? Maybe we're engineering focused and dis-count socio-political things? Maybe not a bad idea to pick just a few places, and maybe you can subsidize people who don't live there and have a hard time. Ray: I'd like to get to the point where we have a few places. EU: Berlin, Paris, someplace else. Repeat. NA: Vancouver, SF, someplace east. AP, not enough experience. Yokohama maybe. Seoul could be the second. Need more experience. Would save a lot of time, effort, money, etc. Decisions draft (Andrew and Alissa) Four questions: - Is this a useful effort? - Are there objectives missing? - Are there objectives here that should not be here? - Are the objectives in the right order? Crocker: Ordered list: Network access more important than safety/security. Right... problem is that we need more coarse ordering. Andrew: We've *been* places where I've felt my physical security was in question. Crocker: The text needs to be more nuanced. Jari: Unclear in the draft: the visa situation. Some of these things vary hugely, but they affect ability and willingness to travel somewhere. And yes, this is a very useful effort. Not sure that general network filtering is in the right order here. Andrew: On document structure, the beginning is probably not clear enough, but some of it might be better broken out into separate items. More explicit distinctions. Alissa: Issues Jari raised about network access are among the most important ones to get clarity on. The IAOC needs more guidance on network filtering and surveillance to avoid perpetual hand-wringing. Leslie: Listing the objectives this way hides important nuance. Ordering objectives, OK. Non-objectives, not really. Remember Vienna... we couldn't really do that now, so "under one roof" might be a non-objective, but it's not black and white. Andrew: Important point, and right to the heart of why this is separate. Other draft is a long list of things that need to be traded off. So we're specifying why we're making the decisions. The problem with Vienna isn't that it's not one roof, but that it didn't meet the interaction criteria. Leslie: Maybe an appendix of scenarios where you step through the logic. Ray: IETF has set calendar through 2022; contracting through 2019. Implementation of this takes place in 2020 at earliest. Andrew: I hope tentative conclusions take the ongoing process into account, not wait until RFC. Harald: Call this "stuff that needs to be considered", not "rules". Andrew: From my PoV, the three things we listed as non-objectives really are things I do not want to be considered. I think these pervert our selection. Alissa: [agrees] Crocker: Prioritizing vs core set of requirements... Drawing a line is difficult, but there are core levels of safety that are not negotiable. There's nuance. There must be some level of safety, but other can be traded off. Document has to make that distinction in order to be useful. Klensin: One of the problems with "not until four or five years from now" is that it has often seemed to be an excuse for not doing something the community wants or, more generally, "no change because it is too far away to consider." That doesn't make it less real, but we need to be a lot more careful about it than we have been in the past. It is also a reason why it is important that the IAOC be more forthcoming about hotel/venue contracts and what is being negotiated. Andrew: What do the chairs want us to do with this document? Melinda: Take it to the mailing list. What would *you* like? Andrew: If it's useful, we'll continue working on it. We're here to be useful. Fred: It's useful. Metrics (Nalini) - Document tries to define "participation" in this context, and... - ...propose objective and fair metrics Participation: - Fundamental participation - Process participation - Remote vs physical vs email Pete Resnick: 1-1-1 says to get the participants to the event, but the participation is contributing on the mailing lists. We're carving the turkey the wrong way here by saying remote/physical/email. Fred: We have physical attendance figures. We also look at where I-Ds come from. We don't collect such information about mailing list posting. Nalini: Remote participation is important. Alissa: We don't have to be concerned with previous policy setting. We're thinking about this afresh, and it doesn't matter what the earlier reasoning was. We don't have to be constrained by past definitions, but just consider what's best going forward. Crocker: The idea of starting with a clean slate is intersting, but risky when there's established practice. If current practice has merits, ignoring it completely can be destructive. Look for ways to improve rather than ways to ignore. WRT participation: observation vs contribution. Participation amounts to just showing up, but what's helpful is contribution. The hard part is for us to be clear about what constitutes contribution that we can have metrics for, vs contribution that we can't measure. Could look at names in a "acknowledgments" section. But ignore physicality, and only count contribution. Harald: The purpose of the IETF is to make the Internet work better. I like the idea of measuring how contributions do that, but we have to focus on that. If you measure something, people will adapt their behaviour to skew your measurements. You need to consider security of measuring. Melinda: Who thinks a measurement project would be valuable? (hum for, none against)