Re: IETF registration fee increase from 2015

Hi Mark,

On 10/5/14, 3:18 AM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> Eliot,
>
> On 4 Oct 2014, at 4:48 pm, Eliot Lear <lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
>
> > Your own group benefited from cross area review, both from transport and
> > security.  Now it is true that area directors and one WG chair flew to
> > your interim meetings.  But normal people didn’t.
> I don’t see how this is relevant; I’m not asking to avoid cross-area review, 
> or to eliminate meetings during the IETF week. Both are valuable.
>
> Regarding “normal people” — I do not think that means what you think it 
> means...
I didn't say you were asking to avoid cross-area review, but it is an
artifact of holding in person interim WG meetings when you are not
planning to meet at the next IETF meeting, which is precisely what you
were advocating.  And "normal" means people who have limited budget and
time to travel all over the world.  That includes people who are not
so-called "standards professionals".


> Two days is useful when you can focus everyone’s attention on the
> matter at hand; I’m not sure whether having such a meeting during the
> circus that is the IETF week — when people will inevitably want to
> duck out for a few hours to attend other meetings — would be useful.
> The experiment to seat people differently during the IETF week
> meetings is very interesting, though. 
Then we have found the limits of our abilities as an organization.

> > And while I am not against interim in person
> > meetings, the pace you proceeded at did substantially increase the cost
> > of participation.  On the other hand, maybe it will be worth the
> > results.  We cannot yet say.
> We proceeded at the pace dictated by our charter. This was very deliberate; I 
> can’t ask engineers who aren’t standards professionals or academic 
> researchers to invest an open-ended number of years into an effort. And, 
> considering the ever-raising costs of coming to an IETF week (to return to 
> the original thread), the cost of attending an interim is substantially less 
> than going to the IETF meeting. 
I am not saying that your pace was wrong, but your last phrase is. 
There is nothing that requires someone to stay the entire week at an
IETF meeting.  The dominant costs for all of these meetings are hotel
and air, and then registration.  Mostly air doesn't vary per trip based
on how long you stay.  That leaves hotel.  Registration actually pays
for the services you use (rooms, staff, RFC Editor, etc).  Given the
number of interims you had, that was a LOT of air travel AND hotel.  I'm
not saying it was wrong, but it was expensive.

Eliot

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