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Re: Sponsors and influence (Re: Making IETF happening in different regions)

2006-03-24 07:40:29
Harald Alvestrand wrote:

One option however would be to seek 'partnerships' between vendors and
the IETF that span more than one meeting.  Unless that impacted the
perceived 'neutrality' of the IETF and its standardisation processes.
I suspect that this would indeed be a question.

To invoke a particularly apt cliche punchline: we are merely haggling about 
price.

The IETF's long-term use of hosts already creates these partnerships, albeit one meeting at a time. Hosts can enjoy very considerable marketing benefits during the IETF.

Moving to a sponsorship model permits the IETF to enjoy continue to enjoy the financial benefits that we rely on from hosts, but permits us to do vastly more rational (and cost-effective) meeting logistics planning. It well might also permit us to obtain enough funds to reduce attendance fees. By way of a simple goal, it might allow meeting fees to be reduced to cover only meeting costs, rather than also used for funding the basic Secretariat.

One of the services that ISOC provides to the IETF is a layer of indirection for sponsors; they give money into a pool administered by ISOC (and get a seat on the ISOC AC in return), but the procedures make it pretty clear that they do not get any direct influence over the IETF standardization process that way.

From a marketing standpoint, Hosts currently get a significantly more powerful position than you just described.

As for whose name is on the sponsorship check, I don't care.


Among the issues Ray could want to calculate would be:

sounds like some good examples.


One option I do NOT want to consider (and which the 770 stand in the lobby kind of dented a little) is to add a tradeshow to the IETF meeting. The next steps in that progression have been travelled before - soon, the tradeshow has a standards adjunct, not the other way around.

Yes, this is an important danger to pay close attention to.

d/
--

Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
<http://bbiw.net>

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