On 5/28/13 6:20 AM, Christian O'Flaherty wrote: > Probably, this lack of social interaction in our region is one of > the main reasons for low participation. Most of latin american > IETFers are currently living outside the region and they engaged in > the IETF when living in the US or Europe. It's difficult to be > involved when no one else around is working in it or think it doesn't > fit well in their current work. A physical meeting will help to > "demystify" the IETF, making it "accesible" from a professional > perspective.
Any sense of why that didn't happen with Australians after the Adelaide meeting? I'm not opposed to meeting in South America but there have been an awful lot of assertions about this or that happening if we do, without a lot of supporting evidence. History, unfortunately, doesn't support many of these assertions, and I think beating the meeting location question to death is at least some small distraction from trying to get at the core issues. For whatever it's worth, I was participating on IETF mailing lists well before attending a meeting. Granted, I'm a native English speaker and wasn't dealing with that as an issue but probably more to the point was that there was work going on in the IETF that directly impacted work I was doing myself. Melinda
