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....
thanks!
to quote from http://www.ietf.org/u/chair/financials.html :
- Food & Beverage $862,500
- Audio/Visual $127,337
- Room Rental $190,265
- Other Meeting Exp $1,925
Total IETF Meeting Expenses $1,182,027
...
The cost for "food and beverage" covers participants' breakfasts, coffe
and break food at IETF events. In the US, this is one way in which
hotels recover the cost of meeting rooms; in one recent query, the
secretariat got a quote on meeting rooms without food for USD 238.000
(at 50% off list price). At a similar meeting where we got the meeting
rooms for free, our food and beverages bill was approximately USD
250.000. Outside the US, we are usually charged separately for the
meeting rooms and the food.
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.
maybe i'm not following, but it looks like
(food + meeting room) / 3 = $350,921
which is still $113K more than getting the meeting rooms only.
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???
harald, please, banks takes cash, not goodwill. if we want to say it
pays for itself, then someone better start collecting money for the food.
i suppose we could say that the meeting rooms are subsidizing the food,
but frankly, i'd prefer that we didn't spend the additional $340K/year,
and folks who want food can have breakfast at the hotel restaurant and
snacks at whatever's available at the lobby level.
now maybe we can't get a better deal 'cause the hotels know they have
a racket. fine. however, we still fill-up whatever hotel we end
up. perhaps we ought to pick one or two hotels to have meetings at and
do a multi-year contract. given the sorry state of the economy, seems to
me that we ought to be able to find a hotel willing to do a deal. we
can even follow casner's lead and book a hotel in silicon valley.
the one thing that the 2001 numbers don't tell us is what we're spending
on the terminal rooms (since in 2001 they were donated, hoorah!). seems
to me that the only thing we should be providing is wifi/10bT and maybe
a printer or two. anyone who can't bring a laptop to an ietf meeting is
probably doesn't need connectivity anyway...
i'm sure wednesday night there will be a spirited discussion...
/mtr