The IETF Administration LLC is planning to make some changes to the process it uses to identify and select venues for IETF meetings. The intent is to improve the process without changing how we assess venues, which will continue to follow the guidelines in RFC 8718 [1].
The planned changes to the venue identification and selection process are:
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Explain clearly all the steps
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Provide clarity on who/how venues can be recommended.
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Providing a clear path for venues and their agents to recommend their own venue and provide us the details we need to assess them. This already happens but in an unstructured and time consuming way.
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Require IETF participants who want to recommend a venue to fill out a form explaining why they think this city is suitable and providing some basic details based on their first-hand knowledge. Assessing cities/venues is a very time consuming process. Utilising local knowledge in this way ensures that we get high quality input from the start and minimises the time we spend assessing unsuitable cities/venues.
The new process is below and we welcome any feedback before Sunday 15 November.
The first step in the selection process is an initial recommendation of a city and/or a specific venue in that city
If the city is within one of the three IETF meeting regions (North America, Asia, Europe) you can make a recommendation in one of two ways:
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If you are a participant then fill out the "Venue Recommendation (Participants)" [2] form and send that to meeting-planning@ietf.org.
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If you are a venue or an agent for a venue then fill out the "Venue Recommendation (Venues and Agents)" [3] form and send that to meeting-planning@ietf.org.
Additionally the IETF LLC solicits recommendations directly from Global Hosts and self-recommends countries and cities within the three regions that it thinks may be suitable.
For countries or cities outside of the three meeting regions, the process in RFC 8719 [4] for an exploratory meeting needs to be followed:
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You must write to the IETF discussion list ietf@ietf.org with your proposal for the IETF to meet in a specific city or country. You will need to explain why you are making the proposal and seek support from other IETF participants.
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If the IETF Chair decides there is consensus to consider the proposal then they inform the IETF LLC.
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The IETF LLC will then work with you to identify cities to take to step 2. You will be asked to fill out the "Venue Recommendation (Participants)" [2] form for each of the cities that goes to step 2.
Once a recommendation has been accepted, the IETF LLC carries out an initial assessment by remotely researching the city and any potential venues in that city. The output of this step is a report that assesses if the city is likely to meet or not meet the requirements and a recommendation on whether or not to consider the city any further.
We then seek community feedback on the assessment report and recommendation. This feedback is assessed and published in a public repository [5]. Depending on the feedback received, we may advance the city to the next step, or return to step 2 and conduct further remote research, or we may reject the city and update the Meeting Location Assessment table [6].
Once a city passes the community feedback step, we carry out the detailed assessment, which may take some years to complete. This includes the following steps:
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Site visits to specific venues undertaken by the meetings team and NOC members to assess the facilities and the network.
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Detailed cost discussions with venues.
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Initial discussions with secondary hotels.
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Discussions with any local tourism or convention bureau on possible support packages.
We may choose not to follow up with a specific city at this stage for a number of reasons, such as all the venues are too expensive or unable to meet our network requirements or not available for our required dates. Depending on the reason for not following up we may update the Meeting Location Assessment table or it may continue to show this as a potential location.
The IETF LLC board is then asked to approve the venue location based on a detailed confidential information pack.
Once the IETF LLC board has approved a venue, the final contracts are agreed and signed.
Once the contracts are signed and we are committed to the venue, we notify the community and update the upcoming meetings [7] page.
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8718
[2] https://github.com/ietf-llc/venue-identification-and-selection-process-consultation/blob/main/IETF_Venue_Recommendation_Form_(IETF_Participant).pdf
[3] https://github.com/ietf-llc/venue-identification-and-selection-process-consultation/blob/main/IETF_Venue_Recommendation_Form_(Venues_and_Agents).pdf
[4] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8719#section-4
[5] https://trello.com/b/whq8I098/venue-selection-input
[6] https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/planning/meeting-location-input/
[7] https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/upcoming/