--On Sunday, 16 March, 2003 01:58 -0500 Theodore Ts'o
<tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 11:46:12AM -0800, Harald Tveit
> Alvestrand wrote:
>> We usually expect higher costs outside North America -
>> London was even more expensive than Yokohama.
>
> Speaking from a purely extremely selfish point of view, as a
> North American, how much would it help if we were to cut
> back to one meeting outside North America every 5-6 IETF's,
> instead of once a year, which seems to be the current rate?
>
> I was not able to get travel funding to go to Yokohama, and
> I will almost certainly not be able to attend the summer
> IETF in Austria.
>
> At one point, I was told that Europeans were paying roughly
> the same for intra-European travel as they were to travel to
> North America, but North Americans were paying more to
> travel to Europe. Is this still disparity (seemingly caused
> by inefficiencies and the lack of competition in the
> European travel market, coupled with the high expenses and
> low profit margins of the various national carriers) still
> true?
Ted,
I'll let someone else answer most of these questions, but I've
noticed that, some months, I would cost me less to get from
Boston to London than from Boston to San Francisco (yes, there
are some trick flights and calculations involved there).
But, a question: Relative to whatever issues you have with
European or Asia-Pacific meetings, would you have similar ones
in non-US North American locations, or are those more like the
US?
The question isn't motivated by finances but by worrying about
a problem that interacts with suggestions about more US
meetings: several of our participants have had serious visa
problems in the last year or so --much more serious than in
the past-- and I see no reason to believe that those problems
are going to get better any time soon. To the extent to which
we want to keep our process international and open, the visa
situation makes an argument for increasing, rather than
decreasing, the ratio of outside-USA to inside-USA meetings.
regards,
john