Re: My view of the IAOC Meeting Selection Guidelines

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On Feb 9, 2008, at 4:56 PM, SM wrote:

> At 19:00 08-02-2008, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>> It seems to me that the $800k budget for a single conference can  
>> buy an
>> awful lot of telephony (or VoIP) bandwidth so that inefficient and  
>> expensive
>> in-person meetings can be replaced by web meetings. Perhaps that  
>> money could
>> even be used to pay programmers to create a workable web-based  
>> voice and
>> video system for technical meetings -- open source, of course.

Having thought about this a little, I think that the real question  
is, what is the cost of a failed IESG meeting.
(Or IAB or IAOC or...)

It is not just a question of doing it cheaper. It is a question of  
doing it cheaper and not impacting the work done by the IETF.

I could set up, and I suspect various other readers of the list could  
set up, a phone bridge with bandwidth for a few thousand US $ per  
year, maybe less, maybe even for "free." There would be, however, a  
significant chance for failures :

- That some participants would not be able to get in, if say they had  
no access to IP. (Now, there are local numbers and if all else fails  
they can be called by the teleconference vendor.)

- That the entire call would fail, say due to a failure of the bridge  
or of a Nic card. (Now, if that happened, we would fire the vendor,  
as they should have fully redundant services.)

I would regard any _free_ service has having a substantial  
probability of failure, given enough usage over time. It costs money  
to protect against failure.

I would give a single IESG call a rough implied value of, say, $  
40,000 (that would equate the year's worth of IESG calls to ~ $ 1  
million USD, which seems the right order of magnitude given the total  
budget, and works out to about $ 600 per AD per hour). I know how  
hard it would be to reschedule one (which I would put in the "not  
going to happen" category), and I strongly suspect the IESG would be  
intolerant to even one missed call. Note that this rough valuation  
implies that one missed IESG call would be worth roughly the entire  
IESG Telecoms budget for the year.

So, the failure rate needs to be << 4 % (one call per year) to make a  
cheaper service truly worthwhile. The solution might be, set up  
several cheaper or free services, round robin between them, and if  
one fails, go to another.

(I set up the rough valuations, and focus on the IESG, merely to  
frame the debate, but similar things could be sad about the other  
phone charges.)

Regards
Marshall

>
> In-person meetings do not have the same dynamics as web
> meetings.  People would react differently if they were interacting
> through a voice and video system.  The aim of a meeting is usually to
> have all the people in one place away from the "distractions" of
> their regular work.
>
>> Surely we can find a way to work together without always having to  
>> fly to
>> distant climes? And we'd save the environment too, if technical
>> professionals got together electronically.
>
> When technical professionals get together electronically, they have
> flame wars. :-)
>
> Regards,
> -sm
>
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