--On Tuesday, August 13, 2013 06:24 -0400 John Leslie
<john(_at_)jlc(_dot_)net> wrote:
Dave Cridland <dave(_at_)cridland(_dot_)net> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 2:00 AM, Douglas Otis
<doug(_dot_)mtview(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
10) Establish a reasonable fee to facilitate remote
participants who receive credit for their participation
equal to that of being local.
I understand the rationale here, but I'm nervous about any
movement toward a kind of "pay-to-play standardization".
Alas, that is what we have now. :^(
There are a certain number of Working Groups where it's
standard operating practice to ignore any single voice who
doesn't attend an IETF week to defend his/her postings.
Thee is also a matter of equity even if one were to ignore the
costs to the community of enabling remote participation. Some
fraction of the registration fee goes to support IETF overhead
activities that are not strictly associated with the costs of
particular meetings. Although it would be a pity to turn us
into a community of hair-splitting amateur accountants [1], it
is inappropriate to expect those who participate in f2f meetings
to fully subsidize those who participate remotely.
...
I don't always understand what Doug is asking for; but I
suspect he is proposing to define a remote-participation where
you get full opportunity to defend your ideas. This simply
doesn't happen today.
...
One option might be to give chairs some heavy influence on
remote burserships.
...
That seems premature at this point: the likely costs aren't
neatly correlated to number of remote participants; so it's
not clear there's any reason to "support" an individual,
rather than support the tools.
Worse, enabling WG Chairs to made de facto decisions about who
participates or not would have the appearance of enabling the
worst types of abuse. It would be worse than figuring out how
to call on advocates of only one position to speak. Even if
those abuses never occurred, the optics and risk would be bad
news.[1[
...
Conceivably what we need is an automated tool to receive
offers to (partially) subsidize the cost of a tool for a
particular session.
Seems to me to be the wrong way to go. I wouldn't want to
discourage Cisco's generosity. And I think it is time to
declare the "Meetecho experiment" to have been concluded
successfully. It can use some improvements and I hope it
continues to evolve (I could say the same thing about WebEx but
I'm less optimistic about evolution). But it works well. If we
want to use it, it is probably time to take it seriously.
Certainly that means having a available for all relevant
sessions, rather than constrained by the size of the current
team and their resources. If that means training for operators
other than the core team, having to put in-room operators on a
non-volunteer basis, and/or IETF assumption of equipment
expenses, that would, IMO, be completely appropriate (of course,
that interacts with your comment about remote participation
having costs).
Similarly, "everyone pays but some pay less or zero and we set
up a procedure and/or bureaucracy to figure out who the latter
are" seems like a bad idea.
Simpler suggestion (this interacts with the "data collection"
thread):
(1) Remote participants are required [3] to register (remote
lurkers should continue to get a free ride for multiple reasons).
(2) The IAOC sets and announces a remote registrant fee based on
overhead expenses (those not associated with physical presence
at meetings). Marginal costs of remote participation are
treated as overhead, not direct meeting expenses, because they
benefit the whole community.
(3) Remote participants pay that fee, or part of it, on a good
faith and conscience "what you can afford" basis with
information about what any particular person pays kept
confidential by the secretariat. Again, we depend on good
faith. Financially, whatever we collect is better than what we
collect today. Collecting some fee is better than none and
either too high a fee or the necessity to beg would discourage
registration or, worse, participation.
(4) If the IAOC or ISOC decide to conduct a diversity campaign
to help keep those fees low, more power to them, but such a
campaign (or its success) are not requirements for the above
model working.
best,
john
[1] Possibly an improvement on a community of amateur lawyers,
perhaps not.
[2] Incidentally, one of the advantages of the otherwise clumsy
and efficient "mic lines" is that they make the queue clear to
everyone.
[3] We should recognize that we have no realistic enforcement
ability, at least unless non-registration is used to subvert IPR
rules. Any mechanism we might devise would not stop the truly
malicious. This has to be a good faith requirement.