--On Friday, August 16, 2013 15:46 -0400 Hadriel Kaplan
<hadriel(_dot_)kaplan(_at_)oracle(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Aug 16, 2013, at 1:53 PM, John C Klensin
<john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
(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.
Baloney. People physically present still have an advantage
over those remote, no matter how much technology we throw at
this. That's why corporations are willing to pay their
employees to travel to these meetings. And it's why people
are willing to pay out-of-pocket for it too, ultimately. It's
why people want a day-pass type thing for only attending one
meeting, instead of sitting at home attending remote.
Being there is important, and corporations and people know it.
Sure. And it is an entirely separate issue, one which I don't
know how to solve (if it can be solved at all). It is
unsolvable in part because corporations --especially the larger
and more successful ones-- make their decisions about what to
participate in, at what levels, and with whatever choices of
people, for whatever presumably-good business reasons they do
so. I can, for example, remember one such corporation refusing
to participate in a standards committee that was working on
something that many of us thought was key to their primary
product. None us knew, then or now, why they made that decision
although their was wide speculation at the time that they
intended to deliberately violate the standard that emerged and
wanted plausible deniability about participation. Lots of
reasons; lots of circumstances.
An audio input model (ie, conference call model) still
provides plenty of advantage to physical attendees, while also
providing remote participants a chance to have their say in a
more emphatic and real-time format. We're not talking about
building a telepresence system for all remote participants, or
using robots as avatars.
IIR, we've tried audio input. It works really well for
conference-sized meetings (e.g., a dozen or two dozen people
around a table) with a few remote participants. It works really
well for a larger group (50 or 100 or more) and one or two
remote participants. I've even co-chaired IETF WG meetings
remotely that way (with a lot of help and sympathy from the
other co-chair or someone else taking an in-room leadership
role).
But, try it for several remote participants and a large room
full of people, allow for audio delays in both directions, and
about the last thing one needs is a bunch of disembodied voices
coming out of the in-room audio system at times that are not
really coordinated with what is going on in the room. Now it
can all certainly be made to work: it takes a bit of
coordination on a chat (or equivalent) channel, requests to get
in or out of the queue that are monitored from within the room,
and someone managing those queues along with the mic lines.
But, by that point, many of the disadvantage of audio input
relative to someone reading from Jabber have disappeared and the
other potential problems with audio input -- noise, level
setting, people who are hard to understand even if they are in
the room, and so on-- start to dominate. Would I prefer audio
input to typing into Jabber under the right conditions? Sure,
in part because, while I type faster than average it still isn't
fast enough to compensate for the various delays. But it really
isn't a panacea for any of the significant problems.
(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. [...snip...]
Yet you're proposing charging remote participants to bear the
costs. I'm confused.
I am proposing charging remote participants a portion of the
overhead costs of operating the IETF, _not_ a fee based on the
costs of supporting remote participation. And, again, I want
them to have the option of deciding how much of it they can
reasonably afford to pay.
...
best,
john