I am all for greater openness and accountability in IETF. But the
starting point for that would be recognizing that we do actually have
a membership and officeholders should be accountable to it rather than
petty attempts to strip officeholders of the only perk they get for
doing the jobs.
I don't think it's really a perk. The perk to doing I* volunteer jobs is
knowing that you are supporting important work. The AMS folks have much more
rigorous schedules than any IETF attendees I know who aren't ADs. You could
argue that some of the I* folks don't need special treatment, but it would be
pretty tenuous--IETF f2f meetings are a very busy time for everybody who
volunteers for IETF, and that's a lot of people. I honestly never
appreciated how much work this was until Ralph took the AD job and I had to try
to meet with him, and even then I didn't really grasp it. When I would wander
down at 6am to play the piano I would always run into AMS people who were
already up and at it.
But I think John was using this as a rhetorical device--a modest proposal, as
it were, not a serious one.
In order for this to change, we would have to stop thinking of IETF attendee
fees as a funding source. That's a big ask. IETF costs money to operate.
You don't see a lot of what that money pays for if you just attend the meetings
and participate in working groups, but there's a whole support infrastructure
for RFC production and meeting logistics that takes people to operate, and
those people have to get paid, because it's a full-time job, not something
volunteers could do.
So if we take IETF attendee fees as a major funding source, then the motivation
to have IETF in locations that attract more attendees remains important. And
those locations are precisely the ones where we have these kinds of problems.
Personally I'd love to do every U.S. IETF in Minneapolis in midwinter, because
I think we get more work done, and that's a nice big hotel, with several others
very close by. But it doesn't generate enough revenue. If you want to say
that that shouldn't be a consideration, you have to come up with a new source
of revenue. Raise attendee fees?
Additionally, we do take on new members a lot of times when we visit new
locations, and these members stay with the organization. This is something
that's documented time after time in admin plenary presentations. Improving
geographical diversity is a big deal, and one way you get new IETF participants
from new, remote locations is to have an IETF near enough that it's easy for
them to attend. If the meetings aren't where the work gets done, and I agree
with Melinda that we shouldn't think of them that way, then actually it's okay
that we suffer a little inconvenience as part of our outreach efforts. I was
forced to skip the Prague IETF, the first I'd missed in more than a decade, and
it was fine. Remote participation isn't perfect, but it's pretty good, and as
a remote participant if you see yourself being disenfranchised you can help by
pointing it out to your working groups and to the IETF leadership if the
working group chairs don't pay attention. If we don't!
skip an IETF from time to time, we don't notice these issues, and it's left
to people who aren't regular attendees to try to figure out whether there's a
problem and how to address it, and that's not reasonable.