Hi John,
I didn't said that operating a meeting outside US is cheaper than in US. I
said that the cost for *participants* is lower.
In fact, I know that a meeting in US is cheaper for the IETF, by the simple
fact that meeting rooms aren't charged, which is not true probably in most
of the other parts of the world.
I also indicated that this is the reason why many sponsors prefer to have
the meetings in US, because it becomes cheaper to them, and one more reason
to split the "sponsor" from the "host" function and arrange the meetings in
venues not tied to a specific sponsor, in order to be able to have them more
frequently outside US.
What this means is that we may need to increase the registration fee. AND
THIS IS THE RIGHT THING DO TO in order to evenly share the costs between ALL
the participants, but only if the sharing of event locations is also FAIR.
Otherwise, more people traveling from other regions to US means more cost
from them, which is not fairly shared among ALL the participants.
The poor network infrastructure is not only a question of the links. It is a
question of having a good or bad network, like the problem that we had all
this week with the DHCP. Having a good link the network was still unusable
60% of the time. It is also a question of good or bad luck, and this may
happen anywhere. A road construction can break a fiber everywhere in the
world and you only avoid this with a backup link, which for example I
believe ICANN doesn't compared with IETF.
Regards,
Jordi
De: John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
Responder a: <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
Fecha: Sun, 29 Jul 2007 11:38:07 -0400
Para: <stbryant(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>,
<jordi(_dot_)palet(_at_)consulintel(_dot_)es>
CC: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Asunto: Re: Do you want to have more meetings outside US ?
--On Sunday, 29 July, 2007 16:04 +0100 Stewart Bryant
<stbryant(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
Do we have any firm evidence that we would get more work
done if we had more meetings outside the US?
As far as I know, we do not.
We also have no firm evidence that, despite the claim in Jordi's
note, total costs of operating a meeting, measured as
Hotel and travel expenses for secretariat staff +
Direct meeting costs (rooms, cookies, AV, network) +
The registration fee +
Attendee costs for hotels +
Total attendee travel and meal costs
The first two of these must be calculated in current US dollars
regardless of the location of the meeting because IASA does
business in dollars. And the others need to be adjusted for
the local (home) currencies of the attendees ("inexpensive
place" may not be so inexpensive if exchange rates are poor for
a significant number of attendees).
In addition, one must consider the odds of meetings being
disrupted by either poor network infrastructure that we need to
deal with or the risk of long-haul connections being sporadic.
ICANN may be able to live with outages in long-haul connections
of several hours duration, but I don't think we can.
I'm actually a strong advocate of non-US meetings, especially
when I see key people prevented from attending by
seemingly-arbitrary delays in approving visas that stretch past
the meeting's starting date. But I am also tired of regular
speeches about either going to places where we don't have
significant participation locally or about claimed advantages of
non-US meetings that I believe are dubious.
And, FWIW, I believe that we are already suffering from too-high
total costs to attendees. Getting a good room rate on a
super-deluxe hotel is wonderful, but, if that hotel comes with
super-deluxe prices for, e.g., breakfast and beer, it really
doesn't help us: to take a recent example, knowing that cheap
beer is a few blocks away doesn't create an obvious location for
bar-bofs.
john
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