I was talking to a couple of people this week about what I consider to
be a related issue: the fact that for the two or three wg meetings I'm
interested in, there's little point in me being at the meeting for a
whole week.
What about holding two or three meetings smaller meetings a year for
each area, and then just one big meeting for the full IETF? That would
bring down the cost of the individual area meetings and therefore the
admission fee, make them smaller and therefore capable of fitting into a
wider range of hotels, and would likely result in fewer nights of hotel
stay for a lot of people.
The financial fallacy in that is failing to note that about half the
meeting fee isn't used to fund meeting expenses, but to fund continuing
operations of the IETF as a whole (secretariat, RFC Editor, etc.) So
restructuring the meetings would have to be done in a way that preserves
the meetings surplus at about the same annual total as today.
Also, personally, I think that once a year wouldn't be enough to keep
the cross-checking between the areas at a sufficient level. And personally,
even if I'm only active in two or three WGs, the chance to sample what's
going in related and even in unrelated WGs, as well as research groups
and BOFs, makes it well worth staying all week.
Brian
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