Thank you David for your insights. We are also hoping that if we can update remote participation facilities, that more people would be able to attend and participate remotely, removing the economic and travel barriers to RIPE Thanks! Leslie On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 1:00 AM, David Hilario <d.hilario@laruscloudservice.net> wrote:

Hi,

Since you are looking at diversity in general, and reason for why people do not participate more, some real life issues preventing from actually going to the meeting can be many.

Those are just some examples that are concrete issues preventing people from attending.

Basically: 1. Money 2. Papers 3. Legal discrimination

This first one is about the simple case of money. Costs were not mentioned too much. The cost of a RIPE meeting ticket, is a monthly salary or more in many countries within the RIPE region and that is without factoring in travel and accommodation.

So even if we were to have the meetings inside some of the poorer countries to save them the cost of travelling and accommodation, it would still set them back a lot in just the meeting costs.

So the costs itself is a barrier to entry and physical participation regardless of location, just sometimes absurdly too expensive when the meeting ends up in London for example.

Second point for the travel papers. Ease of visa requests (if any needed), some countries are easier than other on issuing visas, the Schengen block is actually not the most friendly place on earth to have international conference and receive people from all over the globe, visa applications can be very cumbersome for some countries, even for countries from within the RIPE Region requiring visas to come and visit Schengen block countries.

Many will be discourage from applying when you have to hand over your passport for a couple of weeks or months to an embassy that sometimes happen to even be located in another country than your own with no guarantees of success on your application and a lot of humiliation in the process.

This third one is the local laws.

Some countries may actually not allowing you to be there at all, no visa to be rejected as you simply should not consider it, you are just not welcome just for who you are.

Local laws are sometimes themselves prohibiting people from even considering any physical participation. UAE laws are a good example. They do not let people with HIV into the country, let alone let them take their medicines with them. You may be refused entry based on your country of origin or sexual orientation and identification.

Those things are known in advance, and people should always read upon where they are going anyways.

However, having physical meeting in the various regions even the ones with restrictions is needed to reach out and encompass as much people as possible and invite them to become active members of the community.

I do like the dilemma it poses right there, reaching out to certain communities automatically shuts out people from other communities, nice conundrum with no real way out of it.

Good luck! Good initiative, lots of headaches :D

David Hilario

IP Manager

Larus Cloud Service Limited

p: +852 29888918 m: +359 89 764 1784 f: +852 29888068 a: Flat B5, 11/F, TML Tower, No.3 Hoi Shing Road, Tsuen Wan, HKSAR w: laruscloudservice.net/uk e: d.hilario@laruscloudservice.net

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