Hi, A few notes related to the discussion that has been happening in this thread: Over on manycouches@xxxxxxxx [1] where we have been discussing a possible charter for a new Stay Home Meet Online (SHMO) working group, I have proposed [2] some new charter text to add a work item about principles to guide the determination of registration fees for fully online meetings. Please join the discussion on that list and provide your input about that. Regarding the announcement of meeting fees for IETF 108, as I mentioned previously, the IESG did discuss the meeting fee proposal in advance of it being announced to the community and suggested changes to it. The IESG does not typically vote (about anything, normally), and we did not take a formal vote to “approve” the fee proposal but had the bulk of the IESG disagreed with it, it would not have gone forward in the form presented to us. I think trying to compare the registration fee decision for IETF 108 to registration fee decisions for in-person meeting or registration fee decisions for remote participation at in-person meetings is a lost cause. IETF 108 will be in a new category and its meeting format will be something we have never tried before. Better to acknowledge the novelty of the situation in which we find ourselves than to argue about how to analogize it to something else. Regarding participants who are only interested in one working group, there is a one-day pass option for those who intend to participate in WGs on a single day. It may be that no one will avail themselves of this option, but IMO there was no harm in including it. It is clear that participants in individual working groups may seek to “avoid” paying the registration fee by convincing their WG chairs to schedule interim meetings rather than have their groups scheduled during the meeting week. We are an open community and the IESG has no practical means of preventing people from gathering on web conferences to discuss IETF work outside of the scheduled meeting. My hunch is that a significant proportion of the IETF community is interested in work across multiple WGs or areas and therefore may be enticed to join us for the full meeting week. We are also aiming to arrange things so that WGs scheduled during the meeting week will benefit from having technical support on-call, the full suite of Meetecho features (queue management, integrated blue sheets, etc.), access to a virtual hallway-style experience, and possibly other enhancements to the meeting week experience. We won’t know what participation looks like until we try it, and we won’t make future plans until we gain experience with the current ones. As noted previously, we will be providing up to 100 fee waivers because we recognize that the fee may present a barrier to participation for some. We all wish there weren’t a pandemic, but there is one, so we have to accept the fact of it and adapt. Alissa [1] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/manycouches [2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/manycouches/qkUNflWL1XcxGxrtu8XVvGqdeQQ/
