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Re: Financial state of the IETF - to be presented Wednesday

2003-03-15 18:50:14


--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???





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