On 11/29/07 at 10:15 AM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 11:23:10AM -0600, Pete Resnick
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote a message of 22 lines which said:
It's not "geographic balance of places on the world map" that
people are talking about here. It's "geographic balance of places
where the people who write IETF documents live".
Then, things can go on forever. We do not hold meetings in places
where there are not a lot of IETF members. As a result, people from
these countries do not come and do not participate. Then, the
prophecy becomes true. And so on.
Nonsense. As Alexey pointed out, in the Apps area we have plenty of
participants who are from places in which we rarely meet. Some
contribute to mailing lists, others actually write I-Ds. In the grand
tradition of the IETF, showing up for meetings is not required to be
a successful participant. Sure, it's helpful to go to meetings to
work out thorny issues, but it should by no means be required.
On a tangential point: Some folks in the IETF think that meetings
should be for presentations and tutorials, or to make more-or-less
final decisions on open topics because nobody does anything on the
mailing list. I tend not to go to such meetings and whine about them
when I have to go. If that's your idea of a good use of IETF meeting
time, then I see why you would think that meeting in places with few
participants would be a good thing: Working on those mailing lists
isn't all that useful and you can't be a good participant without
going to the meetings. To me, that says that we should change WG
chairs or ADs, not meeting locations.
If we want to be serious about breaking the vicious circle, we
should do meetings in places where there is *currently* few members
(I do not suggest Namibia or Papua-New Guinea but, may be, Egypt,
Argentina, India, places like that?)
India is becoming interesting because (a) we're getting more folks
from India participating and (b) the mean-time-to-travel to any place
on earth for current participants might be trending toward India.
(We've got more folks in east Asia who would have a shorter trip to
India than to Europe or North America, and there are now direct
flights over the pole between North America and India.) Finding a
large enough venue in India is a different problem.
Personally, on similar mean-time-to-travel grounds, St. Johns in
Newfoundland looks interesting. :-)
pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
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