On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Ted Lemon
<Ted(_dot_)Lemon(_at_)nominum(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Feb 12, 2015, at 3:27 PM, Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu>
wrote:
In the past I've been nervous about giving remote participation too much
power in part because I'm worried about how that impacts meeting fees
and in part because I value cross-area involvement.
It's possible that we could collect meeting fees from remote attendees,
offering a hardship exemption for those who can't afford it. That would
depend on remote attendance working better than it does now, I think, but
it would be unfortunate if the main impediment to making remote attendance
work well were that we didn't want to lose meeting revenue.
[MB] I totally agree on this latter point. I'm very conflicted about
charging for remote participation, but perhaps something nominal. It's
also quite possible that if we improve the quality, we will get more remote
participants. And, I obviously, would be perfectly happy for IETF to cut
back (or do away with) all the food and possibly beverage and not worry,
for example about providing IETF breakfast in cases where it's not part of
the room rate. I know that the model is complex in terms of cost of
meeting rooms being based frequently on the amount of food and beverage
provided, so I'm not suggesting this is simple or would have a huge impact
on overall cost. And, yes, I know that there would be a huge uprising
about this, but we could request the hotels to setup carts, etc. where
people can purchase snacks and drinks during breaks as they often do for
lunches and perhaps the potential revenue that they can get from that could
be factored into the contract to offset the reduced catering request.
[/MB]