Subject: OT Food topic (was Re: Proposed Photography Policy - Transparency and Leadership

From: Mary B <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2018 10:12:16 -0600

Yeah, I know it was OT, but the food issue was in my face when I clicked on
the website to read another organizations photography policy and right
below that is how they handle allergies and they have  the statement about
providing an at venue contact.  The photography issue was justified as
getting us inline with how other conferences do it to be more female
friendly. So, it was in my face, that after 10 years, I still can't eat
snacks at breaks most times.  I clearly have managed over the years, but
it's a little irksome that we are becoming sensitive to other concerns
(which are certainly valid), yet we don't consider it of concern that
people can eat the food provided at meetings, which is partly covered (in a
complex way since different hotels have different of charging for things -
e.g., free rooms with X $s of food) by the roughly $120/day meeting fee.

I guess you didn't read my document.  I'm very clear that who has
responsibility when and it is spread amongst various parties.  The big
thing is that it requires attention during each step of meeting planning up
to participants being at the venue.  As you note, it's the latter that's
still a problem.  And, again the document has been around for 10 years.  It
acknowledges that there have been some improvements (e.g., veggies at
breaks). In London, I know I can walk across the street and buy my own
carrots at break time but I don't always have time and sometimes the
supplies in my backpack run low.

As you note, the big challenge is there are few of us with this concern, so
it's not deemed a high priority.  Anaphylaxis is the extreme and we have
folks that have had to do as you've had to do because of peanuts in
cookies.  But, again, my document covers how food could be provided for us.
Other organizations also do this successfully (I brought this up during
meeting venue).   If they put the safe foods at an area that's marked as
allergy friendly, the masses might stay away because they consider it real
food whereas for folks like us, it would be a huge treat.    Again, I would
love the experiment of not giving folks cookies just one afternoon and in
particular, don't let them know ahead of time and imagine the uproar.

After trying with meeting venue, I'd pretty much given up on this topic,
but again the food issue was in my face when I went to one of the
referenced websites about photograph ;)

Note, I did change the subject since we are OT, which means of courses, the
majority won't even bother to read it.  But,  maybe in the next decade IETF
will develop sensitivity to people's food sensitivities and then at least
my son's peers can come to IETF meetings and have snacks.

Regards,
Mary.

On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 1:57 AM, Anton Ivanov <[email-masked]
> wrote:

> 1. This is off-topic. Food != SLR in your face with the flash on.
>
> 2. You are not attributing the blame correctly. All Eu countries and
> Canada (these are the ones I know for sure, most of the develop world has
> them too) have food legislation regarding allergen labeling and handling.
>
> The issue is - the relevant precautions are invoked _ONLY_ if the person
> who orders asks for it. This transfers the responsibility to the venue and
> they are obliged to act on it. That,as far as I know, has never happened
> despite the fact that dietary requirements are collected on the
> registration form.
>
> This issue has a name on it - it is a person from IETF who deals with the
> actual meeting. We simply should ask for an official answer who and why has
> decided that a recurring "lawsuit in the making" is a good idea. In a
> separate thread.
>
> A
>
> P.S.
>
> I am with you on the beans :) There are places where if IETF is scheduled
> I will simply not go at all. I also carry food with me and do not touch any
> of the prepared ones.
>
> Nothing personal, just business, I do not fancy coming back in a casket. I
> have had 3 anaphylaxis meetings with the blue lights brigade in the last
> decade and I do not fancy another one as it may be the last.
>
> A.
>
>
> On 03/03/18 23:12, Mary B wrote:
>
> As an aside, if you follow some of the threads in that ada initiative
> link, video has also been an issue for some of these organizations.  But, I
> do I think IETF is distinctly different than some of those other
> conferences due to the amount of video that is used as Eric noted.
>
> I also personally don't think we should have turned this so directly into
> a women's issue.  It's a little bit of a red herring to turn this into the
> notion that something like this will help us with the diversity issue, in
> particular in light of the fact that women are not not coming to IETF
> because of photographs, there are other social interaction issues that are
> more of a problem and some of those have been highlighted in this thread.
>  Also, if you go back to the hackathon thread that seemed to trigger this
> whole thing, it wasn't about being photographed or not,  but rather someone
> did not want their badge with their name in the picture.  They didn't ask
> for their picture to be redacted but rather be replaced with one not
> showing the badge.   So, I think this is going a bit too far, but again
> I'll be very happy to be labeled as "don't photograph me" at meetings.
>
> But, while we're on the topic of mirroring policies of other
> organizations, we might consider some of their other policies that could be
> adopted including dealing with allergies:  http://www.
> sirensconference.org/about/questions.html#photography  (just below the
> photography FAQ item).
> I feel very disheartened that it's almost 10 years since I first wrote my
> draft trying to raise awareness of the issue:
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-healthy-food-07
>
> And while we've made some progress, the discussion in meeting venue still
> left the food issue as a would be nice and not mandatory.    Also, my
> document highlighted 4 requirements in dealing with this:
>
>    1.  The meetings should be held in a location where markets that sell
>        foods for special diets are conveniently located.
>    2.  The right food should be accessible to the participants at the
>        meeting venue.
>    3.  Food that is served at the venue should be prepared and served by
>        appropriate methods as described above.
>    4.  The meeting coordination and venue staff should be made aware of
>        participants requiring such food and should be willing to
>        accommodate such requirements.
>
>
> There is labeling of food at some of the venues some of the time, but
> we've never had direct access to is a person at the venue that we can
> contact.  And, yeah, I can bug the secretariat and I have done so, and most
> of the time things are handled, but they have better things to do with
> their time.    And, the number of times that those of us that have dietary
> restrictions have had to hunt down staff to find out what we could eat is
> way more than the number of meetings we attend.  It's not such a big deal
> now that I'm no longer on IAB but folks in leadership positions (some of
> whom do have dietary restrictions) have a lot of meetings and it is hard to
> even think about finding food elsewhere during their very long days.
>
> And, the issue of cross contamination is thoroughly ignored even when I've
> explicitly asked nicely when they've been arranging break food, if they
> could please not put the cookies right next to the veggies at afternoon
> break.  Since people like to use their hands when grabbing food rather than
> tongs (another social issue we have), I rarely can get something at
> breaks.  But, of course with tongs there, people use the same ones for
> cookies and veggies.  This happened in London last time  - while staff were
> setting up, I asked them to re-arrange and the staff told me that would
> "upset the chef" but they would do it latter.  They never did. If we had
> access to a person, we could make sure this didn't happen.  I've said
> before that I"m perfectly happy to interact with the staff ahead of time to
> discuss these issues.   And, as I've said before, in many cases I wouldn't
> have made it through meetings without the contraband food I've brought into
> other countries.  And, yes, we've gotten better about having the meetings
> with market access (requirement 1), but actually being able to eat at the
> venue would be nice (requirements 2, 3 and 4). The only time all the
> requirements have been met was in Beijing and I ended with my personal chef
> Eric - that was only because I just happened to meet the food service
> manager on Sunday, who noted that I was eating so healthy and my response
> was that what was on my plate was all that I could eat from their monstrous
> buffet. He said that just wasn't acceptable. He then got the head chef, who
> appointed chef Eric as my personal chef for the week.  I certainly don't
> expect this level of service everywhere, but the point here is that the
> professionals that run the food services at the venues we use are often
> very willing to be able to handle this well if they're made aware that it's
> a requirement for some of the attendees.  And, I do seriously mean, as
> described in my document that the issue should come up during contract
> negotiations.    And, yes, I know about the other people that manage the
> issue entirely on their own without any fussing, but for me in the past
> this has involved eating a can of green beans with slivered almonds for
> dinner in several situations.  Although, I have found my sprouted pumpkin
> seeds, that are probably illegal to bring into all the countries we visit
> and some US states can serve as adequate meal replacement.
>
> And, yeah, I realize to most of you all, this is just me whining about
> food yet again.  But, just imagine the uproar in this community if you all
> didn't have cookies for even one day at the afternoon break.  Or your sodas
> and the only beverage available all day was water.   And, again, other
> organizations consider this important, so it's not clear to me why this
> can't be the case for IETF.   Especially, now that we seem to have become
> so sensitive about what some might consider to be "personal issues".
>
> Now...back to my drafts...
>
> Regards,
> Mary.
>
> On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 5:42 PM, Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Joel,
>>
>> Yes, we discussed this video issue in the IESG before we wrote the
>> policy. I think there are three relevant differences:
>>
>> 1. Video actually is important to our operations both for documenting the
>> meeting and to allow remote participation.
>> 2. The actual act of videography the way we do it is fairly unobtrusive
>> to the subject, by contrast to still photography, which can be intrusive
>> even if the photos are never published [0]
>> 3. The video that we take is actually pretty hard to work with to find a
>> specific point, as anyone who has tried to work with the archives to get
>> clarity on the minutes knows.
>>
>> So, yes, this line is a bit fuzzier than I would like, but I think for
>> the reasons above, this is about the right place to draw it.
>>
>> Best,
>> -Ekr
>>
>>
>> [0] Yes someone can really get in your face with a video camera, and I
>> would hope that we would discourage that as well, but that's not what
>> meetecho is like.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 3:25 PM, Joel M. Halpern <[email-masked]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> So explain to me why we will allow people to prohibit posting of still
>>> photos of themselves, but we will not prohibit video of them?
>>>
>>> It's not like they can stop others outside our purview from taking
>>> stills from the video and re-posting them.
>>>
>>> Frankly, given modern technology, the difference between video and still
>>> pictures is minuscule.  I was trying to stay out of that aspect of this
>>> policy.  But you have chosen to push it.
>>>
>>> Yours,
>>> Joel
>>>
>>> On 3/2/18 6:20 PM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 3:11 PM, Joel M. Halpern <[email-masked]
>>>> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>     The fundamental driver here is organizational transparency.  Our
>>>>     leaders are accountable to the community.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes. That's why we have videography, minutes, etc. We are talking very
>>>> specifically about published *still* photography.
>>>>
>>>> -Ekr
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>     I am sorry, the image of declaring that the IEtF chair can require
>>>>     that photographers not talk pictures of the IETF chair when
>>>>     presenting to the community seems explicitly wrong to me.
>>>>     Equally, the image of a Working Group chair saying that he or she
>>>>     can not be photographed while running a working group session seems
>>>>     completely counter to the transparency and accountability of our
>>>>     organization.
>>>>
>>>>     We do place behavioral expectations and constraints on our
>>>>     leadership in many ways.
>>>>
>>>>     Yours,
>>>>     Joel
>>>>
>>>>     On 3/2/18 6:07 PM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 2:57 PM, Joel M. Halpern
>>>>         <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>
>>>>         <mailto:[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>>>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>              One of the aspects that concerns me about the policy is
>>>> that it
>>>>              seems to allow our leadership to require that their images
>>>> be
>>>>              removed from pictures of them doing their job.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         I don't understand the motivation for this proposal, and it has
>>>>         clear downsides in terms of discouraging participation by people
>>>>         who wish not to be photographed.
>>>>
>>>>         Why should being a leader require you to have your picture
>>>>         publicly posted? Your appearance isn't any necessary part of the
>>>>         leadership function.
>>>>
>>>>         In case it's not clear, the purpose of the text about panels is,
>>>>         like the text about large groups, a concession to practicality,
>>>>         not derived from the notion that leaders inherently have some
>>>>         diminished right to privacy.
>>>>
>>>>         -Ekr
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>              Yes, there is text about panels.  But that seems
>>>>         insufficient.  I
>>>>              would suggest we add:
>>>>
>>>>                 IETF Leadership (such as IAB members, IESG members, and
>>>>         Working Group
>>>>                 Chairs) should understand that when they are performing
>>>>         their formal
>>>>                 duties they may be photographed, and those photographs
>>>>         may be
>>>>                 displayed in public.
>>>>
>>>>              That would be in addition to the existing text about
>>>>         panels.  Thus,
>>>>              it would cover WG chairs and cases where for example the
>>>>         IAB Chair
>>>>              or IETF chair are presenting even without a panel of
>>>> others.
>>>>
>>>>              I will leave it to others as to whether the example lsit of
>>>>              leadership needs to be more comprehensive.  I hope that we
>>>>         do not
>>>>              need to be more specific about what we mean by performing
>>>> their
>>>>              formal duties.
>>>>
>>>>              Yours,
>>>>              Joel
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>
>

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2018 12:52:26 -0500

On Mar 4, 2018, at 11:12 AM, Mary B wrote:

> Yeah, I know it was OT, but the food issue was in my face when I clicked on the website to read another organizations photography policy and right below that is how they handle allergies and they have  the statement about providing an at venue contact.  The photography issue was justified as getting us inline with how other conferences do it to be more female friendly. So, it was in my face, that after 10 years, I still can't eat snacks at breaks most times.  I clearly have managed over the years, but it's a little irksome that we are becoming sensitive to other concerns  (which are certainly valid), yet we don't consider it of concern that people can eat the food provided at meetings, which is partly covered (in a complex way since different hotels have different of charging for things - e.g., free rooms with X $s of food) by the roughly $120/day meeting fee.    

Yes, this is a huge insult to every IETF participant with dietary restrictions.   And it has gone on far too long.

Keith

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 06:18:19 +0100

I forgot the exact name of the mailing list, but this is probably better
discussed on that "meetings" mailing list ?!:

If i remember correctly, there is all type of stupid meeting venues
pricing isues, whereby they force you to buy their potentially crappy
overpriced food and food service if you want to have a meeting.

Maybe at least in countries like the USA with more awarness, threre
is a way for participants/IETF to force at least better labelling or
other improvements by figuring out how to maybe better apply existing
laws (like for labelling) to the food.

IMHO, dietary restrictions would also be the most easy way for the IETF
to try to negotiate at least the ability to bring in food yourself int the
venue and consume it in public spaces. Usually, many social gathering
options in these venues disallows this, and that can be highly irritating
when yo have food restrictions.

Cheers
    Toerless

-- 
---
[email-masked]

---

From: Mary B <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 09:45:05 -0600

Actually, the US is typically the worst in terms of awareness.  Europe is
significantly better because they generally have a much better
understanding of celiac disease.

My document talks about all the things you mention with regards to outside
food etc.  The challenge there is that there must be a nearby grocery store
(and not just a quick food store that has processed food products).  Again,
I can manage and I've learned the words for the bad stuff in European
countries, in particular in Europe everything is labeled with multiple
languages.  But, in Japan for example, I had to guess.  For food, Singapore
was fine because they had the Western grocery store with a lot of European
products.

I've beat this to death with meeting venue and this ended up that we should
have which isn't in the mandatory section  - i.e., it's criteria to
consider and can be dropped should the meeting selection folks feel a venue
is otherwise satisfactory, so with that criteria, meeting at a country club
outside Dublin is still a possibility:

      The Facility environs, which includes both onsite, as well as
      areas within a reasonable walking distance or conveniently
      accessible by a short taxi ride or by local public transportation,
      have convenient and inexpensive choices for meals that can
      accommodate a wide range of dietary requirements.

   o  A range of attendee's health-related and religion-related dietary
      requirements can be satisfied with robust and flexible onsite
      service or through access to an adequate grocery.

   o  The Facility environs include grocery shopping that will
      accommodate a wide range of dietary requirements, within a
      reasonable walking distance, or conveniently accessible by a short
      taxi, bus, or subway ride, from the Facility and IETF Hotels.

So, it still remains a crap shoot as to whether I can find food to eat
onsite and thus far that's been a rarity for lunch and in general not
possible for many breaks.  Per my original email, only one of the
requirements is met (and again, this document has been around for 10
years).  And, it's at the same level of consideration for people having
access to alcohol and a place to informally meet.

That puts the entire burden on the individual (hoping at least the market
has food and that you have access to a refrigerator), yet here with the
photography, it seems we are being extra sensitive because we don't want to
put the burden on the individual but rather we're asking the community to
respect the fact that someone might not want to tell someone not to take
their picture. Whereas, the community still seems to think that those with
restrictions can just "tough it out" and just make due, when it comes to
being able to get food to eat.  I just have a hard time with that and
that's the very reason why there are laws that categorize celiac disease as
an invisible disability as it impacts the ability to take part in a very
normal daily activity.  So, we ended up with access for those with
disabilities as mandatory. But, dietary restrictions aren't included in
that.  I have a hard time understanding why folks can't seem to get their
head around what it's like to have a whole offering of food around you, but
not being able to eat *anything* because you could get sick or in some
cases die from anaphylaxis. Again, I would love the experiment of not
having cookies at one of the afternoon breaks - there would be near
mutiny.  I can chalk this up to the empathy thing (and I guess my personal
deficit and not being willing to pack a whole extra suitcase of contraband
food products just in case there isn't sufficient food).  But, somehow, the
whole photography thing is intended to address individual's sensitivities
to something that won't physically impact them, although I do understand
the perhaps emotional impact for some. I'm fine if the community wants to
become kinder and gentler and I just remain perplexed that it doesn't apply
to other very real issues.

We already have people that don't come to IETF meetings because of the food
issue, yet we're worried about hypothetical people that might choose not to
come to IETF because they don't want their picture taken?  And, most
particularly because we have meetings that are fully video recorded.

Regards,
Mary.

On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 11:18 PM, Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > > Yeah, I know it was OT, but the food issue was in my face when I
> clicked on the website to read another organizations photography policy and
> right below that is how they handle allergies and they have  the statement
> about providing an at venue contact.  The photography issue was justified
> as getting us inline with how other conferences do it to be more female
> > Yes, this is a huge insult to every IETF participant with dietary
> restrictions.   And it has gone on far too long.
> >
> > Keith
> >
> >
>
> --
> ---
> [email-masked]
>

---

From: Anton Ivanov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 15:58:58 +0000

On 03/05/18 15:45, Mary B wrote:
> Actually, the US is typically the worst in terms of awareness.  Europe 
> is significantly better because they generally have a much better 

Nowdays - yes. It is a law implementing Eu directive 1169/2011 
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32011R1169

Implemented by all countries in theory on the 13 December 2014.

So in theory - it works. In practice the more posh and up-market a hotel 
or restaurant is, the less likely it will comply. You are more likely to 
see strict compliance in a street eatery than in a 4-5 star hotel or 3 
Michelin stars daylight robbery outfit.

So in Europe you do not need to specify anything except "IETF will never 
convene in Paris".

[snip]

A.