High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy of the IETF
RFC 8719
Document | Type | RFC - Best Current Practice (February 2020; No errata) | |
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Author | Suresh Krishnan | ||
Last updated | 2020-02-27 | ||
Stream | IETF | ||
Formats | plain text html xml pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Reviews | |||
Stream | WG state | Submitted to IESG for Publication | |
Document shepherd | Charles Eckel | ||
Shepherd write-up | Show (last changed 2018-01-11) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 8719 (Best Current Practice) | |
Action Holders |
(None)
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Consensus Boilerplate | Yes | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | Alissa Cooper | ||
Send notices to | Charles Eckel <eckelcu@cisco.com> | ||
IANA | IANA review state | IANA OK - No Actions Needed | |
IANA action state | No IANA Actions |
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) S. Krishnan Request for Comments: 8719 Kaloom BCP: 226 February 2020 Category: Best Current Practice ISSN: 2070-1721 High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy of the IETF Abstract This document describes a meeting location policy for the IETF and the various stakeholders required to realize this policy. Status of This Memo This memo documents an Internet Best Current Practice. This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on BCPs is available in Section 2 of RFC 7841. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at 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 document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without 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 work of the IETF is primarily conducted on working group (WG) mailing lists, while face-to-face WG meetings mainly provide a high- bandwidth mechanism for working out unresolved issues. The IETF currently strives to have a 1-1-1 meeting policy where the goal is to distribute the meetings equally between North America, Europe, and Asia (see "Meeting Location Distribution" (slides 14 and 15) of [IETFMEET] for details). These are the locations from which most of the IETF participants have come in the recent past. This meeting rotation is mainly aimed at distributing the travel effort for the existing IETF participants who physically attend meetings and for distributing the timezone difficulty for those who participate remotely. This policy has been neither defined precisely nor documented in an IETF consensus document until now. This BCP RFC is meant to serve as a consensus-backed statement of this policy. 2. The 1-1-1-* Meeting Policy Given that the majority of the current meeting participants come from North America, Europe, and Asia [CONT-DIST], the IETF policy is that the meetings should primarily be held in those regions. That is, the meeting policy (let's call this the "1-1-1" policy) is that meetings should rotate between North America, Europe, and Asia. Note that the boundaries between those regions have been purposefully left undefined. It is important to note that such rotation and any effects to distributing travel pain should be considered from a long- term perspective. While a potential cycle in an IETF year may be a meeting in North America in March, a meeting in Europe in July, and a meeting in Asia on November, the 1-1-1 policy does not imply such a cycle, as long as the distribution to these regions over multiple years is roughly equal. There are many reasons why meetings might be distributed differently in a given year. Meeting locations in subsequent years should seek to rebalance the distribution, if possible. While this meeting rotation caters to the current set of IETF participants, it is important to recognize that due to the dynamic and evolving nature of participation, there may be significant changes to the regions that provide a major share of participants in the future. Therefore, the 1-1-1-* meeting policy is a slightly modified version of the aforementioned 1-1-1 meeting policy that allows for additional flexibility in the form of an exploratory meeting (denoted with an "*"). Exploratory meetings can be used to experiment with exceptional meetings without extensively impacting the regular meetings. For example, these exploratory meetings can include meetings in other geographical regions, virtual meetings, and additional meetings beyond the three regular meetings in a calendarShow full document text