--On Thursday, 27 July, 2023 06:41 +0000 "Salz, Rich" <rsalz=40akamai.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > At the plenary this evening there were many comments from the > IETF leadership that they welcomed ideas on how to be more > inclusive and diverse. Here's four focusing on meeting > attendance. They are rough ideas and need a great deal more > development. > > When having a meeting, try to get a low-cost housing option as > well. Perhaps with limited capacity. Colleges often rent dorms > out, or perhaps reserve an entire hostel – that kind of > price scale. > > Discounted registration for a first-time attendee. Perhaps in > coordination with a longer-term IETFer doing a "bring a > newcomer" or some such. This might have short-term cost > (although maybe not since they wouldn't attend), but fund > the newcomer out of the D&I funding. > > Spend time and effort working to resurrect the "local hub" > concept from a half-decade ago. Help them set up "viewing > parties" that happen during IETF meetings. > > Make one of the meetings decentralized. Held simultaneously in > multiple places around the globe. Getting the logistics and > timezones equitable will be hard, but it would also greatly > reduce our CO2 usage. Rich, With one exception, I think all of these ideas are worthwhile and should be developed further. The exception is discounted fees for people in particular categories. Drawing on later notes, it doesn't make any difference what those categories are: first-time attendees, second-time attendees, WG Chairs, document authors, note takers, participants who go to the microphone, participants who don't go to the microphone, people who wear exciting hats or shirts, nomcom members or volunteers, people who think summer meetings in Phoenix and winter ones in Minneapolis are a great idea (along that dimension, Texas and Chicago may be for wimps :-)), and so on. I'm especially concerned about first-timers who are more or less local to the meeting. My informal and anecdotal observations over the years suggest that, while a few of them might become active contributors (especially if we meet repeatedly in same location), many are effectively tourists, interested in seeing how the IETF works or claiming they have attended at least one of our meetings, but unlikely to contribute to that meeting and unlikely to return. The group who have participated and contributed remotely and are showing up for their first f2f meeting because it is conveniently located are a different matter, but they take us into hair-splitting about what constitute "first time" and/or "newcomer". Collecting registration fees from tourists (or their organizations0 who can pay is fine -- it contributes to the LLC's bottom line and we should not discourage that. On the other hand, if circumstances justify a fee waiver, that is what those waivers are for. As others have pointed out about some of them, we really do not people to volunteer for those roles in order to save a few dollars. More important, there is that fee waiver system. We might need to publicize it more to encourage people who need it to ask. But creating categorizes of participants who get subsidized does not seem to me to be in our best interest. john As others have pointed out, we do have
