Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
So that means every meeting has to bring in $800k, which is a bit more
than the current number of attendees x the current registration fee.
Fred Baker wrote:
One thing the IAOC is looking at at this instant is our phone bill.
The IETF's phone budget for 2008 is
IESG: $58,800
IAB: $22,500
Nomcom: $30,000
IASA/IAOC: $17,235
---------
$128,535
It seems to me that the $800k budget for a single conference can buy an
awful lot of telephony (or VoIP) bandwidth so that inefficient and expensive
in-person meetings can be replaced by web meetings. Perhaps that money could
even be used to pay programmers to create a workable web-based voice and
video system for technical meetings -- open source, of course.
I understand that these budget items aren't directly transferrable, but I'm
struck by how much we pay for bad ways to meet, and how relatively little we
pay for all the other electronic communications that gets the real work
done.
Fred Baker further wrote:
I won't go through the budget line by line, but you get the idea. In
a $4.9M budget, we are looking at a few line items in 6 digits and a
number more in five digits, and asking in each case how to change N
digits to N-1.
This doesn't even count the ever-increasing cost in travel and lodging
expenses that individuals and their companies pay to attend IETF meetings.
That's why I never attend, for example: Too expensive, even when I'd rather
be there to vote!
Surely we can find a way to work together without always having to fly to
distant climes? And we'd save the environment too, if technical
professionals got together electronically.
/Larry
Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
707-485-1242 * cell: 707-478-8932 * fax: 707-485-1243
Skype: LawrenceRosen
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