--On Friday, August 16, 2013 13:07 -0300 "Carlos M. Martinez"
<carlosm3011(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
And, before the IETF would commit to take steps in that
direction, it would be interesting to see some numbers about
how much money needs to be invested in deploying and operating
remote participation tools that would actually make people
feel they are getting value back for a $100 remote attendance
fee.
Please Dave Crocker's note before my comment below -- I agree
with mose of it don't want to repeat what he has already said
well.
As someone who favors charging remote participants, who has paid
most or all of the travel and associated costs for every meeting
I've attended in the last ten plus years, and who doesn't share
in a view of "if I can, everyone can", let me make a few
observations.
(1) As Dave points out, this activity has never been free. The
question is only about "who pays". If any participants have to
pay
(or convince their companies to pay) and others, as a matter of
categories, do not, that ultimately weakens the process even if,
most of the time, those who pay don't expect or get favored
treatment. Having some participants get a "free ride" that
really comes at the expense of other participants (and
potentially competing organizations) is just not a healthy idea.
(2) Trying to figure out exactly what remote participation
(equipment, staffing, etc.) will cost the IETF and then trying
to assess those costs to the remote participants would be
madness for multiple reasons. Not least of those is the fact
that, if new equipment or procedures are needed, there will be
significant startup costs with the base of remote participants
arriving only later. One could try to offset that effect with
some accounting assumptions that would be either rather complex,
rather naive, or both, but, as a community, we aren't good at
those sorts of calculations nor at accepting them when the IAOC
does them in a way that doesn't feel transparent.
(3) Trying to establish a more or less elaborate system of
categories of participants with category-specific fees or to
scale the current system of subsidies and waivers to accommodate
the full range of potential in-person and remote participants is
almost equally insane. While we might make such arrangements
work and keeping categories and status off badges helps, it gets
us entangled with requiring that the Secretariat and/or IAD
and/or some IAOC or other "leadership" members be privy to
information that is at least private and that might be formally
confidential. We don't want to go there if we can help it.
(4) The current "registration fee" covers both some proportion
of meeting-specific expenses and some proportion of overhead
expenses that are not specific to the meetings or to meeting
attendance. Breaking those proportions down specifically also
would require some accounting magic, especially given the
differences between meetings with greater or lesser degrees of
sponsorship. But I believe that, if we can trust the IAOC to
set meeting registration fees for in-person attendees, we can
trust them to set target (see below) meeting registration fees
for remote participants. Note that such a fee involves some
reasonable contribution to overhead expenses (including remote
participation costs, secretariat site visits, and the like) just
as the fee for in-person participants does -- it is not based on
the costs of facilities for remote participation.
So, to suggest this again in a different context:
Remote participants then pay between 0 and 100% of that target
fee, based on their consciences, resources, and whatever other
considerations apply. No one asks how given remote participants
or their organizations arrive at the numbers they pick. No one
is asked to put themselves into a category or explain their
personal finances. The IETF does not need to offer promises
about the confidentiality of information that it doesn't
collect. Any Euro we collect is one Euro more than we are
collecting now and, if a Euro or two is what a participant from
a developing area feels is equitable for him or her to pay, then
that is fine.
That "voluntary fee" model would be a terrible one except that I
think we can actually trust the vast majority of the community
to be reasonable. Certainly some people will not be, but they
would probably figure out how to game a category system or any
more complex system we came up with. Just as the price of
running a truly open standards process including tolerating a
certain number of non-constructive participants (and other
subspecies of trolls), it may require tolerating a certain
number of people who won't want to pay their fair share (or
whose judgments of "fair" might be at variance with what other
people with the same information would conclude). Absent clear
indications that more complex process, or one that relied more
on leadership judgments about individual requests, would produce
more than enough additional revenue to compensate for the damage
and risks those approaches would cause, I think it strikes a
reasonable balance. It also addresses all of the issues about
the problems with charging remote participants that have been
raised in this thread except those based on the dubious
principle that anyone who doesn't attend an in-person meeting is
thereby entitled to be subsidized by the rest of the community.
best,
john