RFC 8719

High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy of the IETF 🧚

okay bestie, this is RFC 8719 🎀 It's a Best Current Practice (BCP 226), so the category is Best Current Practice, not a standards track thing. S. Krishnan from Kaloom wrote it, it came out in February 2020, and its ISSN is 2070-1721. The header doesn't list any document it obsoletes or updates, so it's standing on its own 💅

Abstract ✨

okay so this doc describes a meeting location policy for the IETF and all the different stakeholders who need to make it happen 🦋

Status of This Memo 🌸

this memo documents an Internet Best Current Practice 💜

this is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and it represents the consensus of the IETF community. it got public review and was approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). if you want more on BCPs, check out Section 2 of RFC 7841 📚

for info on the current status of this doc, any errata, and how to send feedback, go to https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8719 🔗

Copyright Notice 🌈

Copyright (c) 2020 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

this doc is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) as they stand on the date of publication. please actually read these, they spell out your rights and restrictions for this doc 🫶 Code Components pulled out of this document must include Simplified BSD License text, as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions, and they come with no warranty, as described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents 📋

1.  Introduction
2.  The 1-1-1-* Meeting Policy
3.  Implementation of the Policy
4.  Procedure for Initiating Proposals for Exploratory Meetings
5.  Re-evaluation and Changes to This Policy
6.  References
  6.1.  Normative References
  6.2.  Informative References
Acknowledgments
Author's Address

1. Introduction 💖

the IETF gets most of its work done on working group (WG) mailing lists 📬 face-to-face WG meetings are mainly for high-bandwidth problem solving, the way you'd hash out the stuff that's still unresolved ✨ The IETF currently aims for a 1-1-1 meeting policy, where the goal is to split meetings evenly between North America, Europe, and Asia. see "Meeting Location Distribution" (slides 14 and 15) of [IETFMEET] for the details 🗺️ those are the places most IETF participants have come from lately. this rotation is mainly about spreading out the travel for people who show up in person, and spreading out the timezone pain for people who join remotely 🌍 this policy was never precisely defined or written down in an IETF consensus document until now, so this BCP is meant to be the consensus-backed version of it 🍓

2. The 1-1-1-* Meeting Policy 🎀

most of the people in the room come from North America, Europe, and Asia [CONT-DIST], so the IETF policy is that meetings should mainly happen in those regions. that's the "1-1-1" policy: meetings rotate between North America, Europe, and Asia. the boundaries between those regions are purposely left undefined 🙈 and the rotation, plus any effect on spreading out travel pain, should be looked at with a long-term view. you could have a cycle in one IETF year that goes North America in March, Europe in July, and Asia in November, but the 1-1-1 policy doesn't require that cycle, as long as the split across regions over several years comes out roughly equal 💅 there are lots of reasons a given year might be lopsided, and future meeting locations should try to rebalance things if they can 👑

this rotation serves the IETF participants we have right now, but participation is dynamic and keeps changing, so the regions supplying most participants could shift a lot down the road 🦋 That's why the 1-1-1-* policy is a slightly tweaked version of the 1-1-1 policy. it adds flexibility in the form of an exploratory meeting (marked with a "*") 🧚 exploratory meetings let the IETF try out unusual meetings without messing up the regular ones. for example, they could be in other geographic regions, they could be virtual, or they could be extra meetings on top of the three regular ones in a calendar year ✨

the timing and frequency of future exploratory meetings will depend on IETF consensus, as decided by the IETF chair 💜 once a meeting proposal is started, the IESG makes the call, working with the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA) [RFC8711], to make sure the proposal can actually be pulled off 🔥 the final decision then goes back to the community so people still get a fair chance to comment 🫶

NOTE: there haven't been many meetings that would count as exploratory under the 1-1-1 policy. the exceptions were IETF 95 in Buenos Aires and IETF 47 in Adelaide. IETF 27 (Amsterdam) and IETF 54 (Yokohama) were earlier exploratory meetings that pioneered Europe and Asia as regular IETF destinations 🌸

3. Implementation of the Policy 🧚‍♀️

IASA should read the policy in this document as the aspiration of the IETF community 💅 any exploratory meeting decisions also get passed along to IASA to implement. the actual venue selection is done by IASA, following the process in [RFC8718] 📚

as [RFC8718] says, IASA is also on the hook for:

• helping the community develop detailed meeting criteria that are feasible and implementable, and
• being transparent, and timely about it, regarding planned meetings so community feedback can be gathered and acted on 🫶

the venue's geographic location has a big influence on venue selection, so it needs to be weighed at the same level as the other Important Criteria in Section 3.2 of [RFC8718]. that can include trading off geographic region to meet other criteria, and telling the community if the region requirement can't be met 🌈

4. Procedure for Initiating Proposals for Exploratory Meetings 🦋

someone who's excited about an exploratory venue proposes it on the IETF discussion list, or on a future discussion list that's set up and announced specifically for this 💖 the community gets to comment and share their opinions 💬 if the IETF chair decides there's community consensus to pursue the venue, it goes up for discussion on the venue-selection mailing list at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/venue-selection 📬 this lets the interested party(ies) polish their proposal using feedback about logistics from the people who'll be evaluating it 👑 once the venue selection process happens, the final decision goes back to the community so everyone gets adequate opportunity to comment 🎀

5. Re-evaluation and Changes to This Policy 🔄

the IETF's participant distribution is always shifting, so this policy is expected to be evaluated and revised periodically, to make sure its goals keep getting met 🌸 before anyone starts a revision of this document, the community needs to agree on the criteria to be met (for example, trying to mirror draft author distribution over the preceding five years) ✨

6. References 📚

6.1. Normative References

[RFC8711]  Haberman, B., Hall, J., and J. Livingood, "Structure of
           the IETF Administrative Support Activity, Version 2.0",
           BCP 101, RFC 8711, DOI 10.17487/RFC8711, February 2020,
           <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8711>.

6.2. Informative References

[CONT-DIST]
           IETF, "Number of attendees per continent across meetings",
           <https://datatracker.ietf.org/stats/meeting/continent/>.

[IETFMEET] Hinden, B. and R. Pelletier, "IAOC Report IETF79",
           November 2010,
           <https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/79/slides/plenaryw-
           3.pdf>.

[RFC8718]  Lear, E., Ed., "IETF Plenary Meeting Venue Selection
           Process", BCP 226, RFC 8718, DOI 10.17487/RFC8718,
           February 2020, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8718>.

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, Melinda Shore, John Klensin, Charles Eckel, Russ Housley, Andrew Sullivan, Eric Rescorla, Richard Barnes, Cullen Jennings, Ted Lemon, Lou Berger, John Levine, Adam Roach, Mark Nottingham, Tom Petch, Randy Bush, Roni Even, Julien Meuric, Lloyd Wood, Alvaro Retana, and Martin Vigoureux for their ideas and comments that made this document better 🫶🌈

Author's Address 🦋

Suresh Krishnan Kaloom

Email: suresh@kaloom.com