Or maybe the answer is that the IETF has to recognize its members as members.
If we are going to make sarcastic dismissive retorts about money trees, maybe its time we started talking about the Trotskyite constitution of the organization in the same terms. Meaning no disrespect to the current office holders, the IETF has essentially the same structure as a Politburo. Cerf and co designed the organization to keep power in their own hands. That was arguably OK in the days when the ADs were effectively the DARPA program managers or their proxies. Not so OK for an international organization.
Lets put all the funding options on the table including the option we would start with if we were setting up the IETF from scratch: An annual membership fee.
I am not at all sure I am going to participate in IETF 108. I will probably register as my company has no other expenses at this point. But it doesn't look very likely there will be any sessions I am going to participate in.
A $500 annual membership fee to cover all the office/secretariat costs would cut the Gordian knot and decouple funding from the meetings. Members would get a reduction in the meeting fees to account for the fact they have already 'paid'. Once meetings and revenues are decoupled, interim meetings no longer represent a concern.
Of course, a membership fee would also have consequences for NOMCON, it would become pretty difficult to avoid voting for ADs and other officers. But accountability is important and useful. And it would force people to recognize that the ultimate guarantor of the independence of the Internet is not control of the IETF, it is the threat of a fork.
On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 9:18 PM John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <022051D6-7CD3-43CA-BD3C-511F7EFAC9E2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> you write:
>> One datapoint: The RIPE meeting which went "virtual"
>in May had *record* attendance (and no fee).
>
>I'd be interested to see how the RIPE funding model compares to =
>that of IETF.=20
RIPE's budget is on its web site:
https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-735
Most of their revenue is membership fees, €35M of a €37M budget.
Meeting revenue was only budgeted at 235K so it wouldn't have been
much of a stretch to forego it.
This is totally different from the IETF which has no members, no
membership fees, and gets a substantial fraction of its income from
meeting fees.
I would be as happy as anyone else to have all of our meetings be free
to everyone but since the Money Faeries don't seem to be showering us
with free cash, if someone proposes we do that, they need to explain
how the budget will work.
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
