Trimming SM's email...
There is a direct contribution of US $2.2 million by the Internet
Society next year. Is the plan to rely on Internet Society subsidies
or to fix the deficit? One argument made was that the fees have not
been increased over the last years. I'll point out that there hasn't
been significant increase in paid attendance over the years. Either
the IETF is only relevant to the usual folks or else the meetings are
not made relevant enough for (new) people to attend.
I am repeatedly struck by how many new people *do* attend.
According to Russ's slides [1] 195/1098 are newcomers. And just to labour the
point, a newcomer is not a returnee after 10 years, but someone who has never
attended before.
This number (around 10%) seems consistent over all meetings. So naively, we
should be growing our attendance by around 300 per year.
That we are not reflects our inability to retain, not our inability to attract
(assuming that we are not completely refreshing the IETF attendance every three
or four years). Should not be rocket science to follow up with some newcomers to
find out why they only attend once and never come back.
All other points made by SM may be valid.
Adrian
[1] http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/85/slides/slides-85-iesg-opsandtech-13