Wow. Time for a reality check. So, we've gone from a discussion of
additional travel time in the 2-4 hour range to an entire "lost day"
in the USD 1000 range for someone on your side of the Atlantic??
I hate to sound sarcastic, but last time I checked, we are not a group
of in-court lawyers, house builders, or craftsmen. Last time I
checked, most of the participants in the IETF are perfectly capable of
working "offline," heck I've even seen some people reading those pesky
Internet Drafts ON PAPER, while a very large number of us seem to be
in possesion of portable devices with various communication
capabilities, even if some of that communication is temporarily
disabled by air travel. Do you remember the early days of the IETF,
waiting for the "terminal room" to open, or perhaps even earlier when
said room was a small computing center at a University? How could we
possibly have survived?
In the words of Chopper Reed, I think we need to HTFU ;-)
[YouTube is your friend]
Ole
Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher, The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972 Mobile: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: ole(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj
On Sun, 24 May 2009, John C Klensin wrote:
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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