High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy of the IETF
RFC 8719

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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 calendar