Re: IETF 78 Annoucement

--On Sunday, May 24, 2009 6:02 PM -0700 Dave CROCKER 
<dcrocker(_at_)bbiw(_dot_)net> wrote:
> What do you think the incremental cost is, for making 1000
> senior engineers people take an additional 8 hours (4 each
> way) and pay for an additional leg of travel.
>
> Perhaps I'm wrong, but it's probably more than US$ 40 per
> person.
>
> When talking about costs and "savings", we really do need to
> aggregate, lifecycle estimates, rather than indulge solely in
> local optimizations.
Exactly.   And, Ole, I think Dave meant "local" in the 
optimization sense, not the geographical one.   There are 
several issues with these kinds of numbers.  First, in many 
organizations, registration fees, travel expenses, and the 
direct and/or marginal opportunity costs of people's time may 
come out of sufficiently different budget pools to make the cost 
of one much different from the cost of another even though the 
number of Euros, Yen, Francs, Crowns, or Dollars (or whatever) 
are the same.   However, I'd guess that, whether it is measured 
in marginal opportunity costs, lost income, or something in 
between, the IETF average for a lost day is in the vicinity of 
USD 1000 loaded.  If we get even 1000 non-local attendees at a 
meeting, adding an extra day in travel amounts to very 
significant money --certainly not a lot smaller than what the 
typical sponsor invests in a meeting.
Incidentally, is is those "lost time" costs that most concern 
me.  I'm worried about airplane and other connections, but far 
more in terms of lost time and what people are expected to do 
after getting off a long flight than in terms of any absolute 
"hub airport" principle.  From that point of view, the "hub 
airport" principle is just a surrogate for some 
harder-to-measure issues.
That is the reason why some of us are pushing back on these 
topics: we wonder whether, in its effectively hidden 
deliberations (that is not a statement about intent, only about 
what the community can learn without complaining first), the 
IAOC is overestimating the importance of the costs of facilities 
and meeting overhead and underestimating the importance of the 
costs to participants and/or their employers or sponsors.  The 
questions produced by those concerns are very important in these 
times because, if a bad judgment on the IAOC's part is amplified 
by the economy, we could have an attendance collapse.  Were such 
a thing to occur with current IETF budget models, knowing that a 
sponsor contributed at lot to a given meeting would be scant 
solace for the problems that would follow.
    john



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