The community was told at the IETF 69 Wednesday Evening Plenary Session to expect a meeting fee increase for IETF 70 in Vancouver. The purpose of this message it to advise you of the amount of the increase and provide the reasons for the increase. We are into September, which means two-thirds of 2007 is now behind us. We know what our IETF expenses have been year-to-date, and we can project our expenses for the rest of 2007. We also know that our meeting revenue for the first two meetings have been below expectation as a result of attendance averaging one hundred fewer attendees per meeting than anticipated. With this information, we can see that the operations will incur a shortfall of more than $200K if we do not take actions for the Vancouver meeting. Accordingly, the IAOC will increase the IETF meeting fee for the Vancouver meeting by $100. By taking this action, our deficit for all of 2007 should be reduced by almost half. To address the remaining deficit, we will continue to work with the Internet Society staff in their efforts to attract additional host and sponsorship support for the Vancouver meeting and to reduce expenses wherever possible without impacting the meeting and experience of the attendees. To date, we have received generous contributions from Microsoft and Telus, which are appreciated, but are not enough to make Vancouver a fully hosted meeting. With respect to what happens in 2008, please note that the IAOC has not made any decisions yet about meeting fees for next year, but we will be actively evaluating the cost of delivering essential services, looking at new approaches to raise additional revenue, and taking another look at future meeting locations with the goal of increasing meeting attendance. More financial information is available at: http://iaoc.ietf.org/ budget.html. In particular see Budget Overview and Year End Forecast.
As a final point of information, please be advised that registration for the Vancouver meeting will begin this week.
Kurtis Lindqvist IAOC Chair _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf