Toerless, Hi. I don't have a convenient URL. Maybe someone else can provide one. But the issues you ask about below, vis-a-vis remote participation with a local user as request manager, come down to fundamental IETF procedural and fairness issues. As only one example, in WGs with controversial subject matter, Chairs often have difficulty managing in-room microphone queues in a way that is generally accepted as fair and balanced. When those queues are long, having someone pick a request up from Jabber and run to the microphone has never worked especially well; I imagine opinions differ as to whether it has worked well enough. We've now got remote queue (and queue management more generally) facilities in Meetecho that should work better than the Jabber relay approach. IMnvHO, we still don't have agreement, skills, and experience with how to make that work well -- things that are more a matter of training and practices than the tools themselves. In the unlikely event that a WG Chair should behave in a way that favors one point of view or one participants or group of participants over others, the actions occur in plain sight and those Chairs are accountable to the IESG.
Now, contrast that with the sort of informal arrangements you posit. The WG Chair isn't managing the queue, the hub manager is. If there are two people in the hub who want to speak, the WG Chair is going to see only the request "from the hub". The hub manager is not directly accountable to the IESG or the community. It is not clear that whatever mechanisms we have for ensuring fairness and good behavior apply to hubs or other remote, non-individual, setups. We have no plan about registration of participants at hubs that are visible to the Secretariat and part of the permanent IETF record. I think that, given time (and I hope keeping our priorities clearly in mind -- see earlier notes), it should be possible to sort all of those issues out although we should view the ICANN experience as cautionary. But doing something ad hoc, with ad hoc local management arrangements, poses a risk to the IETF's ability to have confidence in its consensus model... at least unless the principle that we make no decisions at meetings, only on mailing lists and only based on discussions that are visible on/from those mailing lists is very strictly observed. My observation is that, at least unless there is a specific complaint, and increasing number of WGs have been treating the principle in a more and more relaxed way. best, john --On Friday, July 14, 2017 13:05 +0200 Toerless Eckert <t...@cs.fau.de> wrote: > Eg: For the use-cases discussed on this thread such as > developing world hubs whee i guess the issue is not only > ability not to travel but also inability to have individual > remote participant HW/network connection, i can't quute see how > the first instance of a remote hub should need to be anything > different than a single remote participant hardware > ("notebook") in a room, connected to projector and noise > cancelling speakerphone and a user acting as the remote hub > admin in front of it managing requests for comments from other > participants in the room. Aka: nothing that looks different to > the WG chair than an individual remote participant called > "Room Foobar in Faraway Town". _______________________________________________ NOTE WELL: This list operates according to http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html. https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/vmeet