Subject: Re: Follow up on barriers to entry blog post

From: Abdussalam Baryun <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2017 10:38:20 +0200

Dear Sirs,

Sorry for this long email, but I need to give the respond details.

Thanks for your concerns and support, and I believe that IESG is doing
its best to make IETF the best organisation. However, I have already
send my concerns before years to you about this issue that most
meeting in US is not correct strategy for the best practice of IETF,
the respond I think was that most participants are from US, My
addition thoughts were that most companies participating/hosting are
from US. My reasons of my concerns is that IETF should not follow
others it should lead the participants. Also IETF should not care
about volume of participants (especially old participants), it should
care about varieties/diversity and future participation, the world is
changing very quickly (including US) and hopefully the IETF.

M past suggestions (in many IETF discussions) were to make the
most/best meetings in UK (ex. in London) or Europe, because US
participants get better offers to travel to UK than other offers to
countries in Europe. I also suggested in the past that we need more
work in General Area, but the IETF need to follow interests to such
WG, if no interest the IETF does nothing for its best future.

I studied in the UK and one of the best things I seen from
experts/managers in UK is that they look into unexpected situations to
find solutions. Did we do that so far? I am not sure, please advise
me.

IMO, Your concerns is not enough, you need to change your policy in
General Area, to include diversity and future strategies. May be I am
not familiar with our ADs/IESG decisions in IETF-strategy, but your
email did not mention your past actions/startegies to solve the
unexpected barriers. Old Strategies that include unexpected issues
will help to solve new/future barriers. The WG in General Area your
email referred to is about meeting venues but what about strategies
that this group need to follow. This WG will have majority of
participats from US therefore, it MAY not be fare to work for the IETF
interest, but may support for other companies interests.

Do you have a strategy for the future management issues? please tell
me your procedure as a strategy-plan already defined, or  as WG
charter (or even special group) with milestone. There is no doubt that
any successful organisation needs a strategy to increase opportunities
and decrease threats. My aim for this email is communicate with you
for the best of IETF. Thanks,

Best Regards,

AB

IETF Participant from Libya
University of Tripoli, Tripoli

On 2/16/17, The IESG <[email-masked]> wrote:
> The IESG, IAB and IAOC note the recent US executive order concerning
> entry into the United States and the ongoing discussion of it amongst
> the IETF community. While nations determine who may cross their borders,
> we are very concerned that the resulting uncertainty has damaged our
> ability to host appropriately inclusive meetings and workshops, and may
> result in increased travel restrictions in other locations going
> forward. The present uncertainty affects participants traveling to a
> meeting in the US, or US-based participants returning from a meeting
> held outside the US. We are also concerned that such actions may
> unreasonably limit the ability of engineers the world over to take a
> full part in IETF activities that involve face-to-face meetings.

It is a weakness to follow your participants, because they should not
be your customers, the IETF customers are the users not the
participants. Why you follow your workers, they MUST work for you so
you can continue. IETF should not concern about meeting volumes.

>
> Our primary means of communication (email) does not suffer from such
> restrictions, and we have worked to continually improve remote
> participation for face-to-face meetings. But those who cannot attend
> face-to-face meetings are at a disadvantage compared to those who can,
> and the meetings overall are less effective opportunities for high-
> bandwidth collaboration, cross-pollination of ideas, and focusing on
> running code. We expect the results to be detrimental to our goal of
> making the Internet work better.
>
> The IESG, IAB and IAOC are committed to planning our future meetings in
> locations that do not present an undue risk to our participants and our
> efforts. Our next meeting in Chicago is going ahead as planned, but we
> are working now to investigate any ways in which we can mitigate
> possible disruptions in the near term. Future meetings in the US are
> being reviewed, as we would normally do when we learn of significant
> access issues in any of our planned meeting locations.

Good to know

>
> We encourage the IETF community to raise awareness of travel
> restrictions that make it difficult to attend our meetings in person.

London is the best location for IETF business and future,

> The venue-selection mailing list <​https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/
> venue-selection> is available to provide direct input to the IAOC, and
> the IETF Discussion list is available for other awareness-raising. We
> also urge IETF participants to contribute to the MTGVENUE working group
> <​https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mtgvenue/charter/> that is developing
> criteria and processes for IETF meeting venue selection.
>
>