As, embarrassingly, did I.
Ted had CC'ed me directly "in case he [I] has more details in his files; what I have indicates that we had very low interest in the same time zone theory and we dropped that site.". That seems to align with what I remember, but it's sufficiently long ago that I've flushed all of the info from my cache.
I do remember that there was an ICANN meeting in Nairobi, Kenya in 2010. There were some specific concerns around safety[0] and so there some people organized remote hubs (Dhaka, Reston, and SFO). I participated in the meeting in person, and so I don't have first had experience, but:
1: ICANN is a very different beast to the IETF, and the number of parallel sessions is different
and
2: from what I heard, the experience was not great.
Personally I think that, with our current remote meeting technology, remote hubs don't really make sense[1] - the benefit of "onsite" meetings is bumping into each other, hallway tracks, shared breakfasts, hiding in a corner and working on drafts, etc. Having remote hubs with e.g 1/2 the (onsite) people in one location and the other 1/2 at another results in much less than half of the utility - Metcalfe's law says that the value of a telecommunications network increases proportionally to the square of the number of connected users, and it feels like something similar happens with people at IETF meetings… :-P
I think that it would be better to just go fully remote instead — the logistics of having enough spaces to cover the different tracks, the difficulty in having multiple rooms with good audio and video,, the lack of cross-pollination with disparate groups, etc all seem like they would negate the benefits of having people together…
W
[1]: The one obvious exception to this is where we are trying to build communities and help newcomers participate - I think that having mini-IETFs (sort of like the "NANOG on the road" concept) is very useful.
