Subject: Blue Sheet Change Proposal

From: Ray Pelletier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:16:21 -0400

All,

We are considering changing the meeting Blue Sheet by eliminating the 
need to enter an email address to avoid spam concerns.

Is there any good reason to retain that info bit?

Ray

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From: Alain Durand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:22:27 -0400

Could you replace it by the name of the company the attendee work for?

  - Alain.

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From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2008 19:42:53 -0400

That assumes that every attendee is representing a company, which is  
certainly not
always true.

Regards
Marshall

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From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:12:04 -0700

At Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:22:42 +1100,
Mark Andrews wrote:
> > _______________________________________________
> > IETF mailing list
> > [email-masked]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
> 
> 	It's is the only unique token on the blue sheets.  This
> 	assumes no shared email accounts which is a pretty reasonable
> 	assumption in this case.

I'm not getting why this is important. It's not like we're using it
to key a hash table. As Ole observes, the blue sheets are used primarily
for counting attendance, and I hear, occasionally as proof that someone was 
actually present. In both of these cases, I think we can probably
tolerate this amount of ambiguity.

-Ekr

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From: Rob Austein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:51:27 -0400

> That assumes that every attendee is representing a company, which is  

IETF badges already ask for company afiliation, so at least we'd be
being consistant in our silliness.

I still have fond memories of the gentleman at the Oslo IETF who asked
me, apparently in all seriousness, what "On Sabatical" sold.

On the gripping hand, I tend to agree that this is a problem we don't
need to solve.

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From: Mark Andrews <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:22:42 +1100

Mark
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: [email-masked]

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From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2008 16:49:46 -0700 (PDT)

My understanding is that the blue sheet serves mainly as a record of 
"who was in the room" which I think is largely used to plan room 
capacities for the next meeting. There may be other procedural aspects 
such as measuring consensus, but it seems to me that this can all be 
done without the need to record e-mail addresses.

Ole

Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   Mobile: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: [email-masked]  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj

---

From: Olaf Kolkman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 08:26:59 +0200

> Is there any good reason to retain that info bit?

There may be reasons to contact participants after a meeting, being  
able to tie the name to an e-mail might be of value. If folk think the  
spam concern is important (not me) the engineering approach is a layer  
of indirection: print a registration ID on the badges, and have folk  
fill in that I-D on the blue sheet, together with their names off  
course.

--Olaf

-------------
Due to a mishap my right hand is in cast and I can only type short  
messages using my left hand. Apologies for the snappy tone that may be  
caused by that.

Olaf Kolkman
[email-masked]

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:41:43 +0200

> Is there any good reason to retain that info bit?
I think you should ask Jorge whether the disambiguation factor matters - 
he's the lawyer, unlike all the armchair occupants around here. I don't 
see any other reason to retain them.

Diving straight into armchairing myself, I'll just note that under EU 
data privacy laws, it's illegal to collect personal info for which you 
have no legitimate purpose - so if we never use those emails for 
anything, we shouldn't collect them.

I'm all in favour of making things simpler if we can.

(The hypothetical subpoena could, in theory, lead to me standing in a 
courtroom looking at a blue sheet copy and being asked "is this your 
handwriting", and having to stammer "maybe"..... :-)

Harald

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From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:19:43 -0400

Olaf, with a cast on his right hand, says...
> There may be reasons to contact participants after a meeting, being able to tie
> the name to an e-mail might be of value.

I don't know what blue sheets *you* have looked at, but on the ones I've seen I'd 
say that most of the scrawling looks like you dipped your cast in ink and tried 
to write your email address with it.  And that you're actually left-handed, as 
well.

In other words, most of them are pretty illegible, benefitting neither spammers 
nor those trying to make legitimate contact.

I think it ain't broke.  But, really, je m'en fiche, either way.

Barry

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From: Hadriel Kaplan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 00:24:32 -0400

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Eric Rescorla
>

I think he means if the sheet is truly used for proof of presence and IPR awareness then it's not good enough to allow name collisions.  But I don't see how blue sheets would hold any strength anyway for that purpose, because (1) signing doesn't mean I was there the whole time, and (2) doesn't mean I had stopped reading emails and was paying attention.  And I was not aware that signing them implies any such thing, either - is this announced when they're handed out??

I'm all for removing emails and making blue-sheet-signing go faster, fwiw.

-hadriel

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From: Derek Atkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:56:44 -0400

> anything, we shouldn't collect them.

I've used them.  One time when I chaired a BOF I collected the
email addresses to personally ask if they wanted to be involved
in the mailing list.  (It was done this way because the list was
not set up prior to the meeting).  So, having email addresses
was very important to inform everyone in the room of the list
address.

Maybe this is considered SPAM, but I don't think so.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       [email-masked]             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant

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From: Mr Kim Sanders <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:01:40 -0600

- If there were a database with everyone on file .
- If each person were assigned a permanent identity code .
- If block l(i.e. disconnected) letters were required .
- If persons designated as having legible handwriting wrote everything but 
the signature .

/Kim

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Barry Leiba" <[email-masked]>
To: "Working Group Chairs" <[email-masked]>; "IETF Discussion" 
<[email-masked]>
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 7:19 AM
Subject: Re: Blue Sheet Change Proposal

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From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 11:35:12 -0400

The registration database for each IETF meeting already contains email  
addresses of all attendees, presumably a superset of the blue-sheet  
signers.

More technologically-advanced conferences and trade-shows use RFID or  
(a few years ago) mag stripes to avoid deciphering handwriting. The  
per-card cost is modest and since there are a lot of repeat attendees,  
we all just need our IETF "frequent flyer card". We used something  
like that for speaker identification at the microphone at ACM  
Multimedia 2004; the microphone had a BlueTooth-enabled RFID reader  
that transmitted the code to a data gathering host, which then  
displayed name and affiliation on a screen. The range of the card was  
a few inches.

Henning

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:50:08 -0400

--On Friday, 04 April, 2008 08:26 +0200 Olaf Kolkman
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> There may be reasons to contact participants after a meeting,
> being able to tie the name to an e-mail might be of value. If
> folk think the spam concern is important (not me) the
> engineering approach is a layer of indirection: print a
> registration ID on the badges, and have folk fill in that I-D
> on the blue sheet, together with their names off course.

Or distribute sheets of bar-coded sticky labels in the
registration packet and let people either fill in a name and
number or affix a sticker.  The latter might also improve the
speed at which the things went around the room and would ensure
that neither email nor names could be captured by anyone other
than the secretariat.

But these sorts of methods are worth the trouble only if we are
convinced that there is a problem.   If  there is not, we are
wasting a tremendous amount of time discussing solutions to it.

    john

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From: Bill Manning <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 14:11:33 -0700

WIDE camps have done the RFID thing for several years now.

--bill

-- 
--bill

Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and
certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise).

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From: David Conrad <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 14:18:27 -0700

I'm sorry.  What problem are we trying to solve again?

I thought we were talking about simply removing email addresses from  
the blue sheets, but it seems we're talking about something entirely  
different.

Thanks,
-drc

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From: Bill Manning <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 14:31:59 -0700

i was just giving an amen to Hennings note that participant
 identification in other venues has taken on a different 
 form than "blue-sheets"...
 I don't see a problem to be solved - as long as folks realise
 that attendance/participation in the IETF is not bound by 
 a scrawl on a sheet of paper.

--bill

-- 
--bill