The selection of meeting venues for our physical meetings is a common
area of discussion at the IETF and feedback for the IAOC and its
meeting committee.

A specification of the venue selection process and criteria would be
useful. With community discussion and agreement such a specification
will be very helpful in improving the process and ensuring that the
relevant criteria are properly identified.

The discussion itself may also be helpful. For instance, due to recent
discussions, potential future destinations are announced to the
community to help identify potential issues early.

These processes and criteria support the overall IETF meeting
strategy. The IETF complements its mostly online work with three
physical meetings each year, obviously for the purpose of the
standards development work but also for the opportunities for
high-bandwidth collaboration, cross-pollination of ideas, and focusing
on running code. Existing geographic distribution policy explicitly
calls for rotating meeting locations equally among the largest sources
of IETF attendees, previously defined as North America, Europe, and
Asia, while reserving a possibility for exceptions. The exceptions
are, for instance, meetings outside those regions. The rationale is to
meet in different geographic regions in order to spread the difficulty
and cost of travel among the attendees. The rotation policy, known as
the 1-1-1* model -- with the asterisk denoting the exceptions -- was
set by the IESG, documented in
https://iaoc.ietf.org/minutes/2010-11-10-iaoc-minutes.txt.

The MTGVENUE working group is the forum where the IETF community can
discuss and agree on what should go into the policies, the selection
process, and the detailed criteria going forward. All criteria and all
other aspects of the process are open for discussion. The purpose of
the working group is to produce a community consensus document(s) that
help drive the meeting selection process in a manner that the
community is comfortable with.

The working group shall produce guidance on two areas:

1. A specification of the geographic IETF meeting policy, currently
described as the "1-1-1*" policy. The policy going forward is up to
the working group.

2. A specification that describes the detailed meeting venue selection
process and criteria, the contents of which are also up to the working
group. One possible starting point for this work is
draft-baker-iaoc-mtgvenue-selection-process.

The specification(s) are expected to be Best Current Practice (BCP)
documents. The specifications are expected to provide clear guidance
to meeting selections, be implementable in our operating environment,
and take into account the needs of the highly diverse IETF community.