It has come to the attention of the Applications Area Directors
that one or more Applications area working groups have elected
to not meet in Adelaide, and instead to hold an "interim meeting"
in the United States, presumably because of distance and/or cost issues.
IETF is an international organization, and it is IETF's longstanding
practice to hold its meetings in various locations around the planet.
This serves both to encourage wider participation in IETF and also
to more fairly distribute travel costs and inconvenience (over time)
among all participants. The scheduleing of an interim WG meeting in
the US in lieu of a WG meeting in Adelaide undermines this policy.
This is insulting to non-US participants of IETF (many of whom have
attended meetings in the US for years), embarassing to IETF as
a whole, and a threat to IETF's international stature.
Even if a working group has few participants outside the United
States, a working group does not work in isolation from other
working groups. Attendance at IETF meetings is an invaluable
mechanism for cross-group collaboration.
RFC 2418 states:
Interim meetings are subject to the
same rules for advance notification, reporting, open participation,
and process, which apply to other working group meetings.
Since normal working group meetings require advance notification
via email to the entire IETF list, and the process for getting a meeting
slot involves prior approval of the Area Directors, the same
requirements apply to interim working group meetings. Part of the
reason for prior approval being required is to ensure that the
locations of the meetings are not being chosen to favor certain
participants over others.
There have been several violations of this policy since publication
of RFC 2418.
Therefore,
- All interim meetings within the Applications Area which were not
previously and explicitly approved by the Applications Area Directors,
are hereby cancelled.
- No Applications Area group will hold any interim meeting prior
to April 15.
- No Applications Area group which does not hold a meeting in
Adelaide, will hold any interim meeting prior to July 31.
(i.e. prior to the Pittsburg IETF meeting)
- This applies to all face to face meetings held for the purpose
of conducting working group discussion and to which the working
group is invited, even if labelled "informal" or otherwise
labelled to distinguish them from official working group meetings.
- Exceptions to this policy may be made for recently chartered groups,
but Area Director approval is still required for such groups to
schedule interim meetings.
for the Applications Area Directors,
Keith Moore
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 16 2000 - 10:04:53 EST