Subject: Prague Meeting and Community Survey

From: Ray Pelletier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:32:59 -0400

All;

In the past we have conducted meeting surveys to get feedback on the 
meeting and learn more about the community.

I plan to conduct another survey the week of April 2nd and would welcome 
your input the week of 26 March on questions and possible answers to 
select from.

To get some ideas here are the results of some surveys in the past:
Paris  http://geneva.isoc.org/surveys/results/IETF63/
Vancouver  
http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1656574&U=165657447306
Dallas 
http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=2049947&U=204994788369

I appreciate your assistance.
Thanks
Ray
IAD

---

From: "Tobias Gondrom" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:59:33 +0200

Hello Ray,

I liked the survey from Paris and Vancouver. 
In addition to the questions, there might be one more (with a slightly
different notion):

"Do you prefer to distribute the IETF more evenly between America,
Europe and Asia? 

Answers:
1. No. Increase the ratio of IETF meetings in America. 
2. No. Keep the current ratio
4. Yes. Align the ratio of the meeting sites with the ratio of the
visitors of the IETF conferences of the last three meetings: which would
be approximately 50% America, 33% Europe and 17% Asia."

In case you would like to use the question, please reword it before you
use it, my English is unfortunately still far from perfect. 

Thanks, Tobias

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ray Pelletier [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 3:33 PM
> To: Working Group Chairs
> Subject: Prague Meeting and Community Survey
> 
> All;
> 
http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1656574&U=16565744730
6
> Dallas
http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=2049947&U=20499478836
9

---

From: "Drage, Keith \(Keith\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:19:36 +0200

This may seem like it is fair to all the people that currently attend
IETF, but remember that we should also be counting all the people who
would like to attend IETF, and who could not because it was in a totally
inconvenient, or overly expensive to travel to, geographical location.

If you always hold the meeting in the USA, the vast majority of
attendees will always be from the USA. If you continue to hold 50% of
the meeting in the USA, the algorithm will continue to reflect that half
the meetings in the future should be in the USA.

Any algorithm has to give some precedence to the locations that are
currently underrepresented by attendees.

I am sure this is already written into the procedures, and I am equally
sure that it has been expressed by the leadership in plenaries before
now.

And you don't even seem to have this category in your list.

Regards

Keith 

> From: Tobias Gondrom [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 3:00 PM
> To: Ray Pelletier
> Cc: Working Group Chairs
> Subject: RE: Prague Meeting and Community Survey
> Importance: Low
> 
> Hello Ray,
> 
> In addition to the questions, there might be one more (with a 
> slightly different notion):
> 
> "Do you prefer to distribute the IETF more evenly between 
> America, Europe and Asia? 
> 
> Answers:
> 4. Yes. Align the ratio of the meeting sites with the ratio 
> of the visitors of the IETF conferences of the last three 
> meetings: which would be approximately 50% America, 33% 
> Europe and 17% Asia."
> 
> In case you would like to use the question, please reword it 
> before you use it, my English is unfortunately still far from 
> perfect. 
> 
> Thanks, Tobias
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

---

From: "Eastlake III Donald-LDE008" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:55:10 -0400

Keith,

You are incorrect about the policy and about the reality.

To the extent that a policy has been expressed by IETF chairs, the main
factor has been that meeting location should correspond to attendance
figures, with amount of contribution, roughly approximated by such
things as draft authorship, another factor. The job of the IETF is to do
engineering, not political correctness. Let ISOC and other organizations
start chapters and run workshops all over the world to promote Internet
technology.

Your claim that attendance will simply mirror meeting location is
demonstrably wrong. IETF attendance, particularly from Asia, increased
remarkably despite few meetings there and warrants more meetings
convenient to those attendees. The IETF is not unique in this regard.
Very few IEEE 802/802.11 meetings have been in Asia yet about 1/3 of
802.11 attendance is currently from Asia.

Of course, we will never have an exact relationship between number of
meetings in a country or continent and these various factors. But the
success of the IETF is due to the standards it produces, not due to any
official/governmental backing or "fair" representation of peoples. The
IETF isn't and never has been intended to be democratic. And I, for one,
hope that that the IETF continues to promote engineering quality, which
is a hard enough task, over arbitrary "representational" principles.

Thanks,
Donald

-----Original Message-----
From: Drage, Keith (Keith) [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 11:20 AM
To: Tobias Gondrom; Ray Pelletier
Cc: Working Group Chairs
Subject: RE: Prague Meeting and Community Survey

Regards

Keith

---

From: "Tobias Gondrom" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:25:57 +0200

Donald and Keith,

please do not misunderstand the intent of my proposed question.

I am not speaking of political correctness or "fair" representation. 
Just of keeping very good people from other continents out - and there
are many good people also outside of North America, too. Personally, I
can imagine that the current policy/ratio to chose locations for the
IETF meeting sites is a significant (and unjustified) barrier to people
from other continents (Europe and Asia) to attend the conference and
participate in the work of the IETF. Keep in mind that the higher travel
expenses and procedures you had to go through for Prague and Paris do
reversely apply for all people not from North America for the many
conferences in North America. But this is only my personal opinion.

And that is why I proposed this as a question and did not make a
proposal. 
Maybe most of the IETF do not agree?
- But I believe this is at least a fair question.

Tobias

Ps.: Keith, you are right that the algorithm in answer three is not the
best, but it would be far more than what non-Americans have today. And
it would dynamically adjust over time. It was just an idea. Any other
answer in the direction whether people want more conferences in Europe
and Asia will also do. 

> From: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 6:55 PM
> To: Working Group Chairs
> Cc: Ray Pelletier

---

From: David Harrington <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:39:22 -0400

Hi Ray,

I really like the fact you are taking surveys. Thank you.

Is there a web site with all the surveys?
Was a survey taken for ietf67 (San Diego)? you did not provide a link
and I would be interested in seeing the responses for that meeting
(which I thought was very good).

I especially like the surveys because it reflects the satisfaction
with various aspects of the meetings, and we frequently do not thank
enough those responsible for making the meetings successful, and the
surveys serve that purpose to a degree.

-

I would be interested in learning more about the tutorial responses.
Most people do not attend the tutorials, but most attendees have
little need to attend the newcomer's tutorial, or the security
tutorial if they have already seen this tutorial. 

I recommend separating the responses from those who did attend from
those who did not attend. 23/25 found the DNS tutorial useful or
somewhat useful, but this is hidden by the overwhelming "did not
attend" stat, resulting in a 1.28 average response. 

If the "Topics for Current WG Chairs" tutorial was the WG Chairs'
lunch, I cannot tell how many of the "did not attend" was because the
respondant was not invited to the chairs-only lunch.

I recommend the following questions for the survey

1. If you attended <this> tutorial, did you find it not-useful,
somewhat useful, or useful?
2, If you did not attend <this> tutorial, did you already attend this
tutorial in a previous meeting? how long ago?
3. would you attend more tutorials if they occurred during IETF week
rather than on Sunday?
4. would you attend more tutorials if they were scheduled as
bring-your-own-lunch tutorials during the week?
5. do you feel the tutorial topics are advanced enough?
6. are there any topics you would like to see covered in a tutorial?

David Harrington
[email-masked] 
[email-masked]
[email-masked]

> Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 9:33 AM
> To: Working Group Chairs

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:33:39 -0700

> I really like the fact you are taking surveys. Thank you.

Surveys might indicate if this issue is a real concern or not,
depending on how you ask the questions.  You might as well ask
"Do you want the IETF to be inexpensive and convenient to attend?"
and then "Do you think the IETF should be fair in deciding
where to hold meetings?".

You will get 100% response in both cases -- completely contradicting and
completely useless. You already know the right answer.

There are many factors which make showing up at an IETF meeting
a non-trivial burden.  Sharing that expense equitably is a
responsibility that IETF participants should be willing to accept.

Conflating the problem with a dozen unrelated issues such as
recruitment, crime control, air quality, tourism appeal, and
global warming, is a big mistake.

It is unfortunate that the meeting in China fell though.
I hope over the next 3 years, the locations balance out better.

Andy

---

From: James Carlson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 14:49:12 -0400

> participate in the work of the IETF. Keep in mind that the higher travel

Given that the official business of the IETF is done on mailing lists
(RFC 4677 section 5 has more details), and that a fair number of
active IETF participants either rarely or just never bother to attend
meetings, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that there's any
such barrier to participation.

It is a barrier to attendance, though.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <[email-masked]>
Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive         71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677

---

From: "Romascanu, Dan \(Dan\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:48:00 +0200

> From: Andy Bierman [mailto:[email-masked]] 

Yes. I liked the principle that Fred Baker described (maybe on another
list) - the IETF should go where the contributors come from.

Dan

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:02:38 -0700

> It is a barrier to attendance, though.

It's hard to be consistently effective in the IETF without
attending the face to face meetings.  A lot happens during IETF
week, including BoFs to propose new work.  It is a myth that all
work happens on the mailing list, and always has been.

Andy

---

From: Ray Pelletier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:12:39 -0400

>Is there a web site with all the surveys?
Those links contain all surveys taken

>Was a survey taken for ietf67 (San Diego)?
>
No.

> you did not provide a link
The survey results are also used to evaluate contractor performance.

>attend" stat, resulting in a 1.28 average response. 
I can crosstab to do that.

>respondant was not invited to the chairs-only lunch.
Good point.  I couldn't crosstab on that one.

Thanks
Ray

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:07:22 -0700

At 9:32 AM -0400 3/26/07, Ray Pelletier wrote:
>I plan to conduct another survey the week of April 2nd and would 
>welcome your input the week of 26 March on questions and possible 
>answers to select from.

If you have gone to professional conferences in three or more cities 
in Europe: how would you rate Prague as a potential IETF meeting city 
overall in relation to other major European cities?
- well above average
- around average
- well below average

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---

From: "James M. Polk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:58:20 -0500

>>welcome your input the week of 26 March on questions and possible 

I like the wording (and intent) below

>in Europe: how would you rate Prague as a potential IETF meeting 
>city overall in relation to other major European cities?
>- well above average
>- around average
>- well below average
>
>--Paul Hoffman, Director
>--VPN Consortium