--On Sunday, March 17, 2002 02:04 PM -0800 Bonney Kooper <bk9001(_at_)yahoo(_dot_)com>
wrote:
support that. I suggest let IETF institute a tiered
corporate membership program like all other standards
forums (organizations do pay huge fees for WAP forums
and MPLS forums etc.). Let us have $20 K per year for
The difference is that the IETF is not an organization-membership-based
entity but rather an individual-member-based organization. Your proposal
would alter the basis of membership for the IETF and would encourage the
very behaviour you claim is happening now and wish to prevent: the
excessive influence of large corporations on Internet Standards.
Once you turn IETF into a corporate-membership-based organization (whether
explicitly by membership dues or implicitly by an official sliding scale
paid by the corporation), the bias of attention and service shifts from the
individual to the corporation.
I decided to sit in on the Newcomers Orientation Sunday where one could
learn:
1. that we don't use voting to determine standards to avoid the effect of
anyone packing working group meetings with voters,
2. how all the different documents fit together as part of the process, how
they are produced and reviewed primarily outside of meetings, and
3. the lengthy and tortuous path a proposal must take to become a standard,
of which the working group meetings are only a small part.
The system has been rigged to avoid excessive influence from any one
organization. Maybe it's not always perfect, but you can be assured that
trying to fix or avoid it by tinkering with registration fees will be
futile no matter what structure you set.
As others have pointed out, the registration fee is a rather small minority
of total direct and indirect attendance costs, so protesting it on economic
grounds doesn't seem to be a very strong issue. If your real issue is with
perceived large corporate influence, that should be addressed by
organizational and operational changes, not fee structures.
--
Dennis Fazio
HeatSeeker Technology Partners