--On 15. mars 2003 14:59 -0800 Marshall Rose
<mrose+mtr(_dot_)netnews(_at_)dbc(_dot_)mtview(_dot_)ca(_dot_)us> wrote:
On Wednesday at the IESG plenary, I'm doing a presentation about IETF
financials.
...
harald - many thanks for making this material available. would it be
possible for you to provide just a slight amount of additional material
in your presentation, specifically, could we get a breakdown of the
following meeting costs:
- food
- connectivity/terminal room/etc.
- other major items
The 2001 figures are available on the IETF Chair's pages - the 2002 figures
aren't that much different. They will be published at the same level of
details as soon as the auditors are done with them; I summed these together
until they were reasonably legible when printed on a slide....
it's hard to figure out what to optimize unless we understand the
relative sizes of these things.
for example, my gut reaction is to say "just cancel the food" on the
theory that people can pay for this themselves, with a very small
efficiency hit. in contrast, having everyone arrange their own
connectivity would be amusing, but highly inefficient.
check the notes on the 2001 page - it seems that hotels in the US want to
take just about the same amount off us for meeting rooms + food as they
would otherwise take for the meeting rooms alone. Bizarre, but that seems
to be the case.
Outside the US, the story is different - there we pay for the rooms no
matter what, but I think the "total package cost" is a matter of
negotiation in that case too.
In the case of a 30-minute break, I think it actually pays for itself in
terms of manpower time - the time spent snarfing cookie + coffee and
continuing conversation is a lot more productive than the time spent in the
queue at Starbuck's, bolting the coffee and then jumping back into the next
meeting. OTOH, perhaps people could live from lunch to dinner without
cookies???