Thanks all for the feedback on this proposal thus far. I wanted to provide a
couple of reactions:
- No changes are being proposed regarding live audio streams. These would
continue to be available to anyone without registration.
- The feedback about other information to solicit or questions to ask of
registrants is much appreciated. I'll make sure the IESG, IAOC, secretariat,
and MeetEcho team review the suggestions so we can refine the questions on the
registration form and perhaps also the post-meeting survey. We should probably
do this regardless of whether registration is required or not.
- In the data that MeetEcho already collects, they distinguish between those
who join a session while connected to the IETF meeting network and everyone
else. This doesn't capture all of the cases mentioned in the thread (e.g.,
joining from another location nearby the meeting), but it does cover some.
- Regarding charging, it's possible that we could think about charging for
remote registration in the future. Or not. Or getting it sponsored, or changing
the in-person meeting fee, or changing nothing ... basically it is as Jari
said, perhaps a discussion for the future. But from my perspective the
important things would be: (1) community discussion of any proposed changes,
(2) understanding the remote participant user base, the motivations for
charging or not charging, and the expected outcome of any proposed changes, and
(3) having confidence in any system we have in place that is predicated on
charging (e.g., we don't want people to feel that they are being cheated out of
their registration fee because the system is easily circumventable).
- We could potentially do email validation, although for the purposes of
getting more accurate data I'm not sure it adds a lot of value. My sense is
that the noise in our current data set arises from people inputting different
variations of their name when they join without a registration ID. I don't
think people are deliberately trying to skew the data, so I wouldn't anticipate
that if we require registration that people will register with multiple
different email addresses in order to obtain multiple registration IDs,
regardless of whether we validate the email addresses. Or, if they are looking
to do Donald Duck registrations for an IPR-related purpose, they could still
obtain two registration IDs by registering with two different email addresses
that both validate. But I completely agree that leveraging datatracker logins
could be quite useful going forward.
- Everyone who registers for a meeting, whether it be in-person or remote, is
already presented with the Note Well and asked to acknowledge it as the first
step in the registration process (see https://ietf.org/meeting/register.html
and https://ietf.org/meeting/remote-registration.html).
- The data that we can currently collect can be quite noisy, which is why we
are suggesting to make a slight change in the trade-off between ease-of-access
and data quality. For example, at IETF 98, we counted about twice as many
unique remote attendees (based on names entered) as registered remote attendees.
Alissa