Internet Engineering Task Force S. Krishnan Internet-Draft Ericsson Intended status: Best Current Practice March 9, 2017 Expires: September 10, 2017 High level guidance for the meeting policy of the IETF draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy-00 Abstract This document describes a proposed meeting policy for the IETF and the various stakeholders for realizing such a policy. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on September 10, 2017. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Krishnan Expires September 10, 2017 [Page 1] Internet-Draft IETF Meeting Policy March 2017 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. The 1-1-1-* meeting policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3. Implementation of the policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. Re-evaluation and changes to this policy . . . . . . . . . . 4 5. Open items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1. Introduction The work of the IETF is primarily conducted on the working group mailing lists, while face-to-face WG meetings mainly provide a high bandwidth mechanism for working out unresolved issues. The IETF currently strives to have a 1-1-1-* meeting policy [IETFMEET] where the goal is to distribute the meetings equally between North America, Europe, and Asia that are the locations most of the IETF participants have come from in the recent past. This meeting rotation is mainly aimed at distributing the travel pain for the existing IETF participants who physically attend meetings and for distributing the timezone pain for those who participate remotely. This policy has neither been defined precisely nor documented in an IETF consensus document. The goal of this document is to provide an initial definition of the policy, and eventually to get a consensus-backed version published as a BCP. 2. The 1-1-1-* meeting policy Given that the majority of the current participants come from North America, Europe, and Asia [CONT-DIST], the IETF policy is that our meetings should primarily be in those regions. i.e., the meeting policy (let's call this the "1-1-1" policy) is that meetings should rotate between North America, Europe, and Asia. It is important to note that such rotation and any effects to distributing travel pain should be considered from a long-term perspective. While the typical cycle in an IETF year may be a meeting in North America in March, a meeting in Europe in July, and a meeting in Asia on November, the 1-1-1 policy does not mandate such a cycle, as long as the distribution to these regions over multiple years is roughy equal. There are many reasons why meetings might be distributed differently in a given year, and that is fine as long as the distribution in subsequent years balances out the disruptions. Krishnan Expires September 10, 2017 [Page 2] Internet-Draft IETF Meeting Policy March 2017 BACKGROUND NOTE:The IETF recognizes that we have not always been successful in following this policy over the past few years. In fact, at the time of writing, going back 6 years the meeting locations resemble more the previous 3-2-1 policy (9 Americas, 6 Europe and 3 Asia). This is attributable to two reasons: o we plan meetings 3 years ahead (meaning meetings for 3 of the 6 years had already been planned when the new policy was set) o there were some logistical issues (venue availability, cost etc.). While this meeting rotation caters to the current set of IETF participants, we need to recognize that due to the dynamic and evolving nature of participation, there may be significant changes to the regions that provide a major share of participants in the future. The 1-1-1-* meeting policy is a slightly modified version of the aforementioned 1-1-1 meeting policy that allows for additional flexibility in the form of an exploratory meeting denoted as a "*". This exploratory meeting can be used to experiment with exceptional meetings without extensively impacting the regular meetings. e.g. these exploratory meetings can include meetings in other geographical regions, virtual meetings and additional meetings past the three regular meetings in a calendar year. The exploratory meeting proposals will be initiated based on community consent. After such a proposal is initiated the IESG will make a decision in consultation with the IAOC [RFC4071] to ensure that the proposal can be realistically implemented. The final decision will be communicated back to the community to ensure that there is adequate opportunity to comment. NOTE: There have not been many such exploratory meetings in the past (with IETF95 in Buenos Aires and IETF47 in Adelaide being the exceptional instances). How often we intend to do such meetings in the future should also be an open topic for discussion within the community. 3. Implementation of the policy Once this meeting policy has been agreed upon, the policy will be provided to the IAOC as high level guidance. Similarly, any exploratory meeting decisions will also be communicated to the IAOC to be implemented. The actual selection of the venue would be performed by the IAOC following the process described in [I-D.ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process]. The IAOC will also be responsible Krishnan Expires September 10, 2017 [Page 3] Internet-Draft IETF Meeting Policy March 2017 o to assist the community in the development of detailed meeting criteria that are feasible and implementable, and o to provide sufficient transparency in a timely manner concerning planned meetings so that community feedback can be collected and acted upon. 4. Re-evaluation and changes to this policy Given the dynamic nature of participant distribution in the IETF, it is expected that this policy needs to be periodically evaluated and revised to ensure that the stated goals continue to be met. The criteria that are to be met to initiate a revision need to be agreed upon by the community prior to the publication of this document. (e.g. try to mirror draft author distribution over the preceding five years). 5. Open items There has been some discussion on whether attracting new particpants is one of the stated goals of this policy. At this point the general consensus seems to be that meeting in new regions has not had a statistically significant increase in continued participation. The WG should discuss whether to mention this as a goal or not. This draft uses the terms North America, Europe and Asia without a precise definition of the geographical regions. This might lead to some ambiguities. Is this ambiguity something that is desirable or not? Or should we redefine the regions based on other criteria such as the distribution of RIRs (e.g. ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/LACNIC/AfriNIC), the UN statistical department's classification of macro geographical regions? Do we need to predefine success criteria for the exploratory meetings? One of the ways we can do this is to link the success criteria to the reasoning behind holding an exploratory meeting. It is expected that the proponents of such meetings will be able to come up with the success criteria. 6. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Jari Arkko, Alia Atlas, Fred Baker, Brian Carpenter, Alissa Cooper, Dave Crocker, Spencer Dawkins, Stephen Farrell, Tobias Gondrom, Eric Gray, Bob Hinden, Ole Jacobsen, Olaf Kolkman, Eliot Lear, Andrew Malis, Yoav Nir, Ray Pelletier, and Melinda Shore for their ideas and comments to improve this document. Krishnan Expires September 10, 2017 [Page 4] Internet-Draft IETF Meeting Policy March 2017 7. References 7.1. Normative References [RFC4071] Austein, R., Ed. and B. Wijnen, Ed., "Structure of the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA)", BCP 101, RFC 4071, DOI 10.17487/RFC4071, April 2005, . 7.2. Informative References [CONT-DIST] arkko.com, "Distribution of authors by continent", 2016, . [I-D.ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process] Pelletier, R., Nugent, L., Crocker, D., Berger, L., Jacobsen, O., Martin, J., and F. Baker, "IETF Plenary Meeting Venue Selection Process", draft-ietf-mtgvenue- iaoc-venue-selection-process-04 (work in progress), December 2016. [IETFMEET] IAOC Plenary Presentation, "IETF 1-1-1 Meeting Policy", 2010, . Author's Address Suresh Krishnan Ericsson Email: suresh.krishnan@ericsson.com Krishnan Expires September 10, 2017 [Page 5]