--On Monday, August 30, 2010 21:57 +0200 Olaf Kolkman
<olaf(_at_)NLnetLabs(_dot_)nl> wrote:
The recent remark on bias against individuals[*] made me think
about weighing the location preference by number of
participants from certain regions.
Suppose an individual from Asia attends all IETFs then her
costs are that for attending 6 IETFs she gets to travel 1x
regional and 5x interregional.
While an individual from the US travels 3x regional and 3x
interregional. Clearly there is a bias agains our Asian
colleague in with respect of the costs.
Using participation/contribution numbers to weigh locations
minimizes the global costs (total amount of miles flown,
carbon spend, lost hours by the collective, total amount of
whining) but nothing of that flows back to the individual
engineer that attends every time.
If you want to be fair to the individual participants you have
to optimize in such a way that attending 6 meetings costs the
same for every individual that regularly attends the IETF.
Obviously one can only approximate that by putting fairly
large error bars on the costs but isn't the X-Y-Z distribution
where X= approx Y= approx Z the closest optimum? (or finding
one place that sucks equally for everybody)
Am I missing something?
Well,...
Speaking as one of those independent consultants who, in the
last eight years or so has attended every IETF meeting and paid
all of my own costs to all but one of them (I had a registration
fee waived once), and who was previously sometimes in the
approval loop for corporate permission/sponsorship by others...
If you want to go very far down the path you outline, you have
to ask some questions that we have never asked and to which
you/we may not want to know the answers. Examples:
* Are there differences in different regions as to the
ratio between those who are really participating as
individuals and those who have corporate sponsorship?
* If a corporation typically sends a lot of people to
IETF but has overall cost constraints such that some
choices of location might reduce the total number of
people they sent, would that really reduce overall IETF
effectiveness? Put differently, if such a corporation
cut participation by Go-ers and various other forms of
tourists and damage-preventers, leaving only those who
actively contribute to the IETF's work, would that
result in a worse or slower IETF product?
* Coming back to another optimization discussion, would
you want to adjust the weightings to favor those who are
actively participating in a variety of IETF efforts over
those who come to participate in one or two WGs and
otherwise have spare time?
* Remember that, for some people and some companies, the
perceived costs of having someone with real design or
product responsibility away from his or her desk may
completely dominate any travel or registration costs.
For other situations, that is definitely not the case.
If one really wants to look at costs in depth, I would also
point out that the Beijing meeting has a de facto minimum
registration fee (registration + minimum visa fee) for US
citizens of $775 and one for most others of $110 less. Because
of differences in visa policies in other countries, meetings in
other locations may impose differentials disfavoring other
groups.
And all of that is in addition to points made by others
including that distance is not a very good surrogate for overall
costs (or even airfares), that some of these optimizations may
pessimize overall attendance or attendance by active
participants, etc.
So, while I might personally benefit from the sort of revision
in formula you suggest, I have significant doubts that you can
really make those measurements and that optimization correctly
(for some sensible value of "correct"). Unless "we" can figure
out how to control overall costs and the cost-efficiency ratio
for just about everyone, I know I'm going to need to stop
attending meetings face to face for which I don't have (or seek)
sponsorship. That is just how it is; I'd much rather see the
focus on controlling overall costs to everyone, examining
locations and meeting schedules for their consequences on time
away from home (which translates into lost billable hours for
some of us and irritated families for some others), whether a
meeting in a particular location requires making a tradeoff
between staying in an inconvenient place and staying in an
expensive luxury hotel, and so on.
john
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