Subject: Re: [ericas] IETF Meeting in South America

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 13:05:23 -0700

Hola,
At 08:54 23-05-2013, The IAOC wrote:
>The IAOC would like to understand if the IETF community thinks that the IETF
>should have a meeting in the next few years in Buenos Aires.  The IAOC would
>also like to get feedback on how we can ensure the meeting is as successful as
>possible and on ways to grow participation in the region.

There is a thread on the [email-masked] mailing list about the above ( 
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg79456.html 
).  If I recall correctly some of you have been asking for the IETF 
to organize a meeting in South America.  I suggest that you provide 
feedback on the [email-masked] mailing list about this.  If you remain 
quiet the IETF might not cross the Rio Grande. :-)

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

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From: Arturo Servin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 17:23:27 -0300

We have provided feedback.

	So far a bit more of 40% of the people that has responded the survey is
from Latin America/Caribbean or South America.

Regards,
as

On 5/23/13 5:05 PM, S Moonesamy wrote:
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg79456.html ).  If I
> recall correctly some of you have been asking for the IETF to organize a
> meeting in South America.  I suggest that you provide feedback on the
> [email-masked] mailing list about this.  If you remain quiet the IETF
> might not cross the Rio Grande. :-)
> 
> Regards,
> S. Moonesamy

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 13:17:07 -0800

> from Latin America/Caribbean or South America.

I continue to think that we need to keep our focus on increasing
participation from those areas.  If having a meeting there helps
solve that problem, outstanding.  If having a meeting there doesn't
help, well, there we are.

Melinda

-- 
Melinda Shore
No Mountain Software
[email-masked]

"Software longa, hardware brevis."

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 16:08:46 -0700

Hi Melinda,
>help, well, there we are.

Agreed.

A meeting by itself will only bring one-off participation (people 
attend the meeting and disappear after that).  In my opinion the IETF 
would not consider that as participation.

If after having a meeting in South America there is no significant 
increase in participation it is improbable that there will be more 
meetings in that region.  People can find reasons for the lack of 
participation but that won't help much.

There was a stalemate in a WG discussion last year.  An alternative 
to resolve that was to have a face-to-face discussion at the next 
IETF meeting.  The issue was not resolved through a vote or a 
hum.  Working group participants had to express their opinion so that 
the Working Group Chairs could find an acceptable way to resolve the 
issue.  That required having the people who were participating in the 
mailing list discussions in the room.  If these people cannot come to 
a meeting in South America it is a problem as the work of the working 
group has to be delayed or else the working group has to be shut down.

There was an IETF interim meeting which coincided with a RIPE (RIR) 
meeting.  The interim meeting (see 
draft-jaeggli-interim-observations-01) was a failure.  My guess is 
that it would likely be the same if the interim meeting was held 
together with a LACNIC meeting.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 04:11:04 -0700

At 16:06 23-05-2013, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
>We now have roughly 1/3 of our attendees and authors from Asia, 1/3 
>from Europe, and 1/3 from North America. We have a few people from 
>South America, of which you are one, and the only time we have 
>people from Africa is when ISOC pays for them to come. We try to 
>position meetings in those continents once a year, it doesn't quite 
>work for reasons that require an adult beverage to discuss, but we 
>do try. And we get a lot of commentary from folks that would like 
>the IETF to be a development organization.
>
>There is a political aspect. The ITU pays the air fare for people 
>from developing countries, and friends vote for friends. This is 
>relevant in WSIS/WCIT/WTF, where the ITU periodically offers itself 
>as the SDO of the future. I won't go into that further, but it is 
>the elephant in the room, and there, I have said it.

I looked at the registration list for the last IETF meeting for 
participants from Africa:

  Benin                     2
  Democratic Rep. of Congo  1
  Republic of Congo         1
  Gambia                    6
  Nigeria                  11
  Sudan                     1

None of those 22 individuals have posted any message to the IETF 
mailing lists I read.  I doubt that they have posted any message to 
the other IETF mailing lists or that they will do that after 
attending an IETF meeting.  It's fairly well-known within the IETF 
that people from Africa do not participate.  There are a few people 
from South America who do participate.

The ITU has a budget of over 300 million Swiss Francs.  It can afford 
to pay the air fare for people from developing countries.  If the 
IETF is turned into a development organization for emerging regions 
it will be able to hold meetings in emerging regions and pay for 
participants from emerging regions to attend its meetings.  More 
attention will be given to people from emerging regions who are 
influential.  This means choosing political people instead of technical people.

A person from South America asked how to comment about a ITU document 
which is about IPv6 security.  The answer was that the only way to 
comment was to forward the comments through a (ITU) sector 
member.   If you are from an emerging region you probably know how 
difficult it is to contact the ITU representative in your 
country.  It is difficult to know whether the comments you provided 
will be forwarded to the ITU.  I don't think that the ITU is bad or 
that the IETF is perfect.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

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From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 12:22:56 +0100

On 05/26/2013 12:11 PM, S Moonesamy wrote:
> comment was to forward the comments through a (ITU) sector member.

Just to clarify. Scott (the IETF's ITU liaison) and the relevant
ADs (Sean and I in this case since it was a security thing) are
happy to pass back good comments as appropriate.

Formally, from the ITU-T point of view, those are ISOC comments
since ISOC are a sector member. In reality, they're comments from
folks on IETF lists. And like all such, they should and mostly
do get handled according to how technically sound they are.

However, most liaisons seem to me to be enormously boring and
largely unimportant, so I'd much rather we got normal technical
contributions on IETF lists about current and proposed IETF
protocols and that folks do not spend loads of time liaising.

S.

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From: Juliao Braga <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 May 2013 14:56:48 -0300

This is the main question with one pragmatic solution proposal in brief,
and well justified!

Juliao

Em 26/05/2013 13:42, Dave Crocker escreveu:
> If we are serious about wanting more participation from
> under-represented regions, then let's attack that issue seriously and
> substantively, rather than with an expensive marketing show.