--On Wednesday, 28 March, 2001 11:41 +0100
graham(_dot_)travers(_at_)bt(_dot_)com
wrote:
OK, so when are we going to move from having 2 meetings per
year in the USA ?
How about 1 per year in North / South America, 1 per year in
Asia / Australasia and 1 per year in Europe / Africa ?
Graham,
Subject to constraints of invitations and practicality, part of
the plan has been to do this statistically. I.e., when 2/3 of
the active participants are from outside the USA, I assume we
will move, or have moved, toward having 2/3 of the meetings
outside the USA. But even that is conditioned somewhat by two
other factors that are not under our control but can be quite
significant:
* There are many places which, were we to hold meetings in them,
would set off concerns about junketing and tourism of other
sorts. Many organizations have rules about "conventions" which
IETF escapes but which would get invoked if we started a regular
tour of known tourist locations in season. Those rules tend to
favor attendance by marketing types and to impose restrictions
on working-engineer attendance. To by cynical about it, one of
the attractions of Minneapolis in February or March, or (to pick
on a place we haven't been) almost anywhere in South or
Southeast Asia during monsoon, no one would accuse us of going
there to meet in a nice place where many of the attendees would
come and not participate. While it would presumably be
convenient for you, I'm actually worried a bit about London in
that regard.
* Meetings in the USA tend to be, relatively speaking and in
terms of the costs Fortec sees, cheap. While it is often a
stretch (e.g., the San Diego hotel was clearly a bit too small),
we can still manage to use hotel facilities and meeting rooms,
and, when we fill the hotels up with people, we typically get
those facilities at very attractive rates. Almost everywhere
outside the US, we've ended up needing to use conference
facilities, which we pay for separately. Those conference
facilities impose costs separate from the hotel ones, make it
harder to run a single 24 hour terminal room (increasing costs
or decreasing convenience), and so on. London is going to be a
good deal more expensive than Minneapolis and, were we not
applying some smoothing functions, you would be seeing _very_
high registration fees. I think the Japanese meeting will
probably be worse. And I, at least, don't want to get to a
situation in which we see significant numbers of people who
don't/can't come because of meetings costs -- would really bias
the participation.
john