On Feb 9, 2008, at 4:56 PM, SM wrote:
At 19:00 08-02-2008, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
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.
Having thought about this a little, I think that the real question
is, what is the cost of a failed IESG meeting.
(Or IAB or IAOC or...)
It is not just a question of doing it cheaper. It is a question of
doing it cheaper and not impacting the work done by the IETF.
I could set up, and I suspect various other readers of the list could
set up, a phone bridge with bandwidth for a few thousand US $ per
year, maybe less, maybe even for "free." There would be, however, a
significant chance for failures :
- That some participants would not be able to get in, if say they had
no access to IP. (Now, there are local numbers and if all else fails
they can be called by the teleconference vendor.)
- That the entire call would fail, say due to a failure of the bridge
or of a Nic card. (Now, if that happened, we would fire the vendor,
as they should have fully redundant services.)
I would regard any _free_ service has having a substantial
probability of failure, given enough usage over time. It costs money
to protect against failure.
I would give a single IESG call a rough implied value of, say, $
40,000 (that would equate the year's worth of IESG calls to ~ $ 1
million USD, which seems the right order of magnitude given the total
budget, and works out to about $ 600 per AD per hour). I know how
hard it would be to reschedule one (which I would put in the "not
going to happen" category), and I strongly suspect the IESG would be
intolerant to even one missed call. Note that this rough valuation
implies that one missed IESG call would be worth roughly the entire
IESG Telecoms budget for the year.
So, the failure rate needs to be << 4 % (one call per year) to make a
cheaper service truly worthwhile. The solution might be, set up
several cheaper or free services, round robin between them, and if
one fails, go to another.
(I set up the rough valuations, and focus on the IESG, merely to
frame the debate, but similar things could be sad about the other
phone charges.)
Regards
Marshall
In-person meetings do not have the same dynamics as web
meetings. People would react differently if they were interacting
through a voice and video system. The aim of a meeting is usually to
have all the people in one place away from the "distractions" of
their regular work.
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.
When technical professionals get together electronically, they have
flame wars. :-)
Regards,
-sm
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