ATypI 2026 Sharjah – who is going?

Personal opinion not the views of my employer etc; but I should mention I have some influence over the sponsorship by my employer of the event; and I am currently at the event in question. 

Not attending one event of an international organization that holds it's events around the world, because one finds the location of the one event distasteful or worse*, makes sense to me. 

However, since the call for boycott is now for the organization itself, it seems to me there would be something odd about an "international" organization existing as such, if it only to hold it's events in Western Europe.

Is that what you mean, Miles?

If one runs an event always in the same city as calls the event "Typo$CITY", that's obviously not a problem: It says what it is on the tin. There's not really any valid criticism I can see about that. It's unfortunate that there is a rich history of such events only in Western Europe (that I'm aware of), but the main solution I see is for people to run such events in their local area -- and this is increasingly the case. It's also good that international organizations run their events all over. I myself ran the Crafting Type workshop events all around the world in part because I wanted to see more type design education being available in places where there was none, myself growing up in a rather provincial place where I was frustrated by the (lack of ) local culture in my own interests.

If an international organization like atypi, Unicode, w3c or my own small thing was to develop a list of desirable candidate locations from which to call for offers to host it's events, and to have a policy of rejecting any proposals for locations not on the list, well, what criteria should be used to construct the list?

Or if the list is inverted, I can see that locations where people may be punished upon return (like Cuba for USA residents) could be blocklisted, along with active warzones.

Aside from that, to support people who do boycott particular locations for any personal reason, I also believe such organizations ought to prefer locations that can handle hybrid participation, and raise funds and allocate them to hybrid participation systems that work well, and obviously from me it's ideally done using libre software; the Chaos Computer Club has enabled the Libre Graphics Meeting to do this for many years.

(*not to minimize how dangerous many places are to many people's liberties - just saying the line we each draw starts somewhere, and shorter of such danger; I'm not keen to attend any event in Las Vegas, despite living in the USA... Sorry nevada friends )