Two things brought up in this thread disturb me. First, there seems to be the idea that we should be choosing where IETFs are held for political purposes--to make statements for or against certain governments. I'm not quite sure this was said or implied, but if it was, I'm made a bit uncomfortable by it.
I certainly understand we should carefully consider situations that make people unable or unwilling to attend an IETF. Maximizing the number of active (and potentially active) participants who can make it to a meeting is a valid thing to consider. If the political policies of a country make it hard to get the people we need in that country then we should go there less frequently or not at all. Note that one way these policies can make it hard for us to get the people we need in a particular country is for these people to be unwilling to travel to that country. However in similar situations (not all of them within the IETF context) I've seen the desire to avoid a particular country go beyond what is justified by a desire to make the conference accessible. In some cases it seemed to venture into the realm of political statement. The conference seemed to want to say that they were taking a stand against the policies of a country. That is dangerous: getting involved in politics may compromise our ability to construct the best Internet we can. There may be some cases where we must get involved in politics; I'm skeptical that any involve conference venue selection. Even worse, it sometimes seems like the desire is to go beyond a statement and actually punish countries by not going that. That's just stupid; we end up punishing our own attendees from those countries, not the countries themselves. Again, I'm not sure I see this problem in this thread. It's not entirely clear what peoples' motivations are. I know that I feel more comfortable with the outcomes of discussions based on fair distribution of travel and convenience of participants than I do with the outcomes of discussions based on fingerprinting, rules and who is involved in a particular country's decision making process. This is true even when the discussions produce identical results; the process matters. Secondly, I'm concerned that people are proposing optimizing for pleasant climate and good vacation spots. I come to the IETF to get work done; I'd rather be at meetings where the other participants have the same goal. We should be somewhat careful of optimizing for enjoyable location. I'd rather see us optimize for who can attend and cost. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
