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

[Sivasubramanian Muthusamy]

Hello Fred,

It is an unrestrained response to the issue in question. All of ISOC
needs to recollect individual experiences of participation in ISOC
meetings held in conjunction with other events.

A very strong, provocative question occurs to my mind, which I would
write down here with a purpose : Should ISOC continue to hitchhke on
other events or should it have its own events?

I think we shouldn't wait till 2011 for the next INET, or whatever we
would call the global ISOC conference.

Sivasubramanian Muthusamy.

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Fred Baker <fred at cisco.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
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