On Oct 25, 2011, at 8:55 AM, Ping Pan wrote:
the original issue remains: please make IETF meetings easier and cheaper for
us to go to. ;-)
I think that a lot of people would like that. There are a number of problems
that need to be solved to make them cheaper to attend.
One is the issue of air fare and hotel cost; these have been brought up before.
25 years ago, all meetings were in the US, as were most of the participants.
People came from Europe and Australia at significantly greater cost, but for
the average attendee, putting all meetings in the US reduced meeting cost. It's
now 25 years later, and that logic doesn't remotely start to work. From my
perspective, the best we can do in that regard is place meetings somewhere that
some of our participants come from and is less expensive than other choices for
remote attendees - if we place the meeting far from everyone, it will cost more
for the average attendee than if we at least put it near *someone* that is
likely to attend.
Here's a thought for you. Folks have periodically proposed that all meetings
happen at the large international airports, the hubs in the transportation
system. That reduces transportation costs by putting the meeting somewhere that
everyone can relatively-easily get to. What hotels do you find in those
airports, what do they cost, and what do they offer? We could, for example, put
the next IETF at Frankfurt Am Mein, and have everyone stay in the Sheraton
Frankfurt - or not. We could all go to Narita, and try to hold a meeting in the
$40 hotels near it - or not. It turns out that if you're trying to reduce cost,
you go somewhere that isn't the hub of the transport network. That gives you a
lot more options, and often options that you might actually prefer.
Something that *can* help there is to not require the hotel to be in/by the
conference center. The "one roof" rule tends to mean that we select many-star
hotels. Tell us that we can put the people in one place and the meeting
somewhere else, and people can choose less-star hotels if they like.
Another issue relates to the conference center itself. We routinely have nine
breakout sessions going at once, hold receptions, deliver coffee and cookies,
and have meetings with 1000 people in a room. That means that we look for
conference centers that can host those meetings. 25 years ago, the usual
solution was for the host to donate the use of their own conference facilities
(my wife still mentions the fact that we had a meeting at the University of
Hawaii Honolulu and I spent an entire week in Hawaii indoors); when we became
larger than 500 people and needed more than a handful of rooms at once, that
got hard. Practical solutions that either reduce the room requirements or make
for ways they can be donated might help. Go to the beach?
Oh, by the way, the conference cost is a deal, a horse-trade. If we meet in a
conference center separate from hotel space, we can't offer the place room
nights as a trade-off against meeting space, which means that both costs tend
to go up.
I think something helpful to reduce the attendance fee would be to find a way
to provide corporate sponsors to underwrite the cost. An issue we routinely
have is that corporate sponsors want to be selling something, and the engineers
that make a competitor's product aren't usually potential customers. Also, the
companies that are likely to do so tend to have a number of attendees, and can
do the math - sponsorships come out of a single budget, while attendance fees
come out of departmental budgets, but the sum is the same. The companies that
routinely help out one way or another also tend to feel that it's someone
else's turn to be generous. Ideas there would be helpful.
So, here's something you can do that would actually help. Tell us how to reduce
not the price of cookies or the price of the hotel room, but the price of the
entire meeting as viewed by the average attendee.
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