--On Tuesday, 31 July, 2007 01:23 -0400 Jeffrey Altman
<jaltman(_at_)columbia(_dot_)edu> wrote:
...
In my opinion you want to keep the cost of in person
participation down so that there aren't two classes of IETF
participants, those who are face-to-face and those who aren't.
But we have had that participation model for many, many years,
even when the registration fees were zero or trivial. You are
part of it and, if you count lost at-office time in figuring out
expenses, would probably remain part of it even if the
registration fees change: the reality is that relatively few
IETF participants are worth less than $600 a week
The notion that NomCom eligibility should be determined by
those who attend meetings just doesn't make a lot of sense for
an organization that prides itself on only making consensus
decisions on mailing lists. Instead, we should minimize the
challenges to active remote participation and find an
alternative source of funds.
I wouldn't go so far as "doesn't make a lot of sense", although
I agree that it is problematic. The difficulty has been, in
part, that no one has proposed a better system and, in part,
because of an assumption that the meeting-attendees are much
more likely to be in touch with personality, skills, and
behavior patterns than those who particular purely by mailing
list. Of course, the latter assumption becomes more dubious as
the community gets larger and the Nomcom members know
proportionately fewer people and need to rely more on what they
can learn from interviews and questionnaires than on their
personal knowledge and experience.
One notion might be to charge for publications of Internet
Drafts. $500 for a draft name including five revisions and
then $25 for each additional revision. The rationale is that
it is the draft publications which create work for the entire
IETF and the cost of that work should be borne by those who
want to see the work accomplished.
Of course, this would completely prevent the use of I-Ds to
float new ideas and would reduce their utility for documenting
alternate positions in a coherent way rather than just poking at
the existing drafts on mailing lists. Sometimes drafts are
produced for the convenience of the community or to help clarify
the issues with a possibly-bad idea, by people who have little
financial interest in "see[ing] the work accomplished". I think
it would be a monumentally bad idea.
If we were to do anything along those lines, I'd think about
trying to spread the non-meeting overhead costs across the
entire participant base, e.g., by making subscriptions to
IETF-related mailing lists and access to documents free, but
charging a yearly participation fee to anyone who wanted to post
anything to any IETF mailing list. I think that is a very bad
idea too, but one that is less bad than the I-D one.
john
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