[Chapter-delegates] INET Meetings - Global INET 2011 and beyond

[Fred Baker]

On May 26, 2008, at 2:05 AM, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy wrote:

> In the thread "Dormant Chapters" Michiel Leenaarshas observed that   
> "ISOC is often seen to be a traveling circus around other peoples  
> events", we need to be seriously concerned. Perhaps we should  
> immediately plunge into action on the ideas generated on the  
> threads "ISOC Election Results" and "INET meetings - Global INET  
> 2011 and beyond" with attention to your action plan in this email  
> message.

Well, at the moment it is. The reason is that ISOC participants have  
a reasonable probability of being at various events, and it makes  
them reasonable places to have a small meeting.

If one is trying to get ISOC interested in a particular activity, one  
message we hear voiced is "let's have a board meeting or a chapter  
meeting at that event." We heard this for example surrounding the  
IGF. For the Internet Community - the folks who operate the networks,  
pass out names and addresses, and write specifications - IGF  
attendance is largely defensive. It is an assembly of the clueless,  
in large part, and produces nothing that helps us do our job. The up  
side of attending is that it helps to understand the viewpoints  
expressed by customers and regulators, I suppose. But the problem of  
IGF is that it has potential to make a mess of things. Hence, we have  
to be involved, to educate the ignorant, who often seem noticeably  
beyond education. I tend to think that the logic behind "I want ISOC  
to show up so lets have a ... meeting at this event" ultimately  
fails, because if I am interested in the ISOC event and not on the  
event it is attached to, I will skip the attached event and show up  
for ISOC. When ISOC Board Meetings have been attached to ICANN, for  
example, I arrive for the board meeting. Other trustees that are  
involved in ICANN but not IETF similarly tend to arrive at the end of  
the IETF meeting when ISOC Board Meetings are attached to IETF.

Now, the logic "ISOC people are there, let's save travel costs by  
meeting there" has the all-important premise "we are already there".  
For INET or for a chapter summit, I doubt that there is any one  
meeting that "all ISOC will already be attending". As such, it makes  
more sense to plan it as a stand-alone meeting.

We have some history trying to associate INET meetings with IETF  
meetings, and that history, in my opinion, helps draw the conclusion  
that large ISOC meetings should be stand-alone. The canonical example  
was INET in Montreal in 1997, which was held in conjunction with the  
IETF meeting - one meeting was on one hall and one was on the next in  
the Montreal convention center. I should preface my comments with a  
statement of bias: they are from an IETF perspective. I was IETF  
Chair at the time and also a technical contributor to both meetings;  
I imagine similar issues came up from the ISOC side, but they weren't  
brought to me. Now, the co-location was a good thing in the sense  
that the somewhat-disjoint-somewhat-overlapping communities had the  
opportunity to meet each other. There were also a list of annoyances  
that made it hard - refreshment breaks, for example, were at slightly  
different times and had different offerings, and the IETF found  
itself feeding the ISOC people and running out of refreshments for  
itself. The people that were working in both areas were run ragged -  
they would be doing technical work in one meeting and have to leave  
halfway through to sit on a speaker's panel at INET, and then run  
back to see how the technical discussion turned out. And the IETF  
(which always has people sitting in on other meetings out of personal  
interest) had a new source of looky-loo's: people that thought asking  
ignorant questions in working group meetings was a way to get an  
education. In general, having largish meetings in parallel doesn't  
work very well, at least in our experience to date.

But they could be in successive weeks in a common location, or a  
couple of weeks separated from other meetings wherever one wants.