Bob et al -
My guess is that the in-person fees were providing at least some subsidy
for the remote attendees. There are costs to provide the infrastructure
for recording and streaming each of the sessions (and those include the
time of the secretariat and other staff to set things up). My further
guess is that we have no clue about the actual cost to provide "just
online" even with all that happened for 107 and that the fee number they
came up with is nothing more than a good guess which will be refined
each time we do an on-line only meeting (plus all of the 100+ virtual
interim/non-interim WG sessions we're still having that have to be paid
for somehow).
I think the LLC did a good job in balancing conflicting needs by
providing the possibility of fee waivers. To be honest, I wish the fee
waiver were only partial as I think having some skin in the game from
all of us is important. I don't remember who said it, but "People don't
value things they get for free" seems somewhat applicable.
Later, Mike
On 6/1/2020 11:39 AM, Bob Hinden wrote:
Jason,
I think the issue here is that we are now charging for something we didn’t before. That is, we allowed remote participation at IETF meetings without a fee unto and including IETF 107. As Brian points out, this change in policy was done with out any discussion.
I also note that everything we do in the IETF has a cost to it. Every email, internet draft, submission to the IESG, working group charter, IETF tool, etc., etc. We can see all these costs in the IETF LLC budget. None of it is free.
The question is which of these do we charge for? According the budget at:
https://ietf.org/blog/ietf-administration-llc-2020-budget/
the non-meeting operating expenses are about $5.1 million per year. Even the meeting revenue (including registration fees) doesn’t cover all of the meeting expenses. That is, $3.8M revenue vs. $4.1M costs.
How do we decide what to charge for? What is the policy?
Also, what does the budget look like without face to face meetings?
Bob
