--On Sunday, 29 July, 2007 16:04 +0100 Stewart Bryant
<stbryant@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Do we have any firm evidence that we would get more work
> done if we had more meetings outside the US?
As far as I know, we do not.
We also have no firm evidence that, despite the claim in Jordi's
note, total costs of operating a meeting, measured as
Hotel and travel expenses for secretariat staff +
Direct meeting costs (rooms, cookies, AV, network) +
The registration fee +
Attendee costs for hotels +
Total attendee travel and meal costs
The first two of these must be calculated in current US dollars
regardless of the location of the meeting because IASA does
business in dollars. And the others need to be adjusted for
the local (home) currencies of the attendees ("inexpensive
place" may not be so inexpensive if exchange rates are poor for
a significant number of attendees).
In addition, one must consider the odds of meetings being
disrupted by either poor network infrastructure that we need to
deal with or the risk of long-haul connections being sporadic.
ICANN may be able to live with outages in long-haul connections
of several hours duration, but I don't think we can.
I'm actually a strong advocate of non-US meetings, especially
when I see key people prevented from attending by
seemingly-arbitrary delays in approving visas that stretch past
the meeting's starting date. But I am also tired of regular
speeches about either going to places where we don't have
significant participation locally or about claimed advantages of
non-US meetings that I believe are dubious.
And, FWIW, I believe that we are already suffering from too-high
total costs to attendees. Getting a good room rate on a
super-deluxe hotel is wonderful, but, if that hotel comes with
super-deluxe prices for, e.g., breakfast and beer, it really
doesn't help us: to take a recent example, knowing that cheap
beer is a few blocks away doesn't create an obvious location for
bar-bofs.
john
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