Participation doesn't worry me as much as diversity of views and interests. In particular, whose interests are people participating to further?
The Internet has five billion users. No organization like the IETF can expect to scale beyond 1500 active participants and still function. So I see absolutely no prospect of the IETF establishing a sufficient representation of Internet users to represent their views directly.
Back in the 1990s, the IETF was a significant fraction of Internet users, one of the issues here is that the Internet has grown but the IETF still has the post-Kobe constitutional arrangements.
The situation reminds me very much of the issues the Clinton White House set out for us as problems they would like the Web to solve for them. One of them was the ability to disintermediate the press and get their message out to the people directly without having the Murdoch press reinterpret it with their own spin. Which we did manage to address with the publications server. The other problem was mass listening and it is a much, much harder problem. We did manage to deploy some technology within the federal government for Al Gore's Open Meeting. But that only ran for two weeks.
I'm not too bothered by who someone's current employer is. Loyalty to the guild is usually much more reliable than loyalty to a particular short term interest of your current employer.
Worrying about grinding the last farthing out of the customer base is in any case a middle management concern. The C-Suite spends its time worrying about anti-trust and being replaced by the next technology. Or at least they had better if they want to continue.
On Tue, Oct 3, 2023 at 1:32 PM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 10/2/23 09:51, Livingood, Jason wrote:
> Saying that "pay-to-play fee was instituted" seems a little overblown.
>
> Pay-to-play **IS NOT** IMO:
> - Paying a fee to attend a conference in order to partially cover the costs of that conference
> - An employer letting an employee spend time volunteering to serve as a WG chair or AD, etc.
>
> Here's what pay-to-play **IS** IMO:
> - Paying a fee of $X for a company to join and participate in an organization (without the fee you could not join a mailing list, etc.)
> - Having documents that are approved by voting by named, paying companies & where the amount of payment drives the weight of the vote (i.e., if Company A paid $10 and Company B paid $5, then Company A's vote is weighted at 2x Company B's vote)
It doesn't matter (much) what it's called. Fact is, to participate
effectively in IETF these days costs a significant amount of money, even
if only a fraction of that money goes to IETF or the people who manage
IETF meetings. We used to honestly do most of our work on mailing
lists, but these days mailing lists are much less effective than they
used to be, for a variety of reasons that are not easily fixed.
Keith
