On 6/11/2020 2:42 PM, STARK, BARBARA H wrote:
Put a statement on the registration page: IETF needs to raise $515,145 to pay for costs that would normally have been covered by in-person registration fees. See https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf108-registration-fees/ for more details. We request that those who are able to pay the fees do so. Any who are not able, please simply check the "waiver request" box. You will then be able to register for free. If your company would like to help sponsor our experiment with unlimited waivers (to enable IETF to continue allowing all to contribute, regardless of situation) , please contact us at <email>.
Let me make one small, possibly tongue in cheek suggestion after first telling a story:
About 10 years ago, a pair of authors I read found themselves in financial trouble after their publishing house shut down suddenly. To dig themselves out of the hole they were in, they reached out to their readers and proposed: We have an idea for a story. Here's the first chapter. Every time we get our readers contribute a total of $300, we'll release another chapter (max 1 per week) until we're done (figuring ~35-40 chapters). The chapters are free to read to anyone. Anyone who contributes at least $100 total will get a dead tree edition of the book if we ever formally publish it. It took just 3 weeks for them fully subscribe the book - something like 40+ chapters had been "paid" for.
So why don't we set a price on each WG? We'll provide free access to webex for a given WG once we've had paid subscriptions equal to (some fraction (1/2?) of a number based on maybe the mailing list enrollment, the last in-person room size, the last on-line blue sheet). A full fee registration lets you designate 3 WGs as "paid" and gets you access to all subscribed or not. A half-fee registration gets you access to 3 WGs and you can pay $30 for additional WGs to access.
As I said - possibly tongue in cheek, but I'm actually kind of curious to see which WGs would garner the most "votes" in this sort of model. Its not a serious suggestion at this point.
In any event, the fall back would be the audio stream and jabber for WGs that weren't fully subscribed.
Later, Mike
