--On Sunday, May 24, 2009 6:02 PM -0700 Dave CROCKER
<dcrocker@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
What do you think the incremental cost is, for making 1000
senior engineers people take an additional 8 hours (4 each
way) and pay for an additional leg of travel.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it's probably more than US$ 40 per
person.
When talking about costs and "savings", we really do need to
aggregate, lifecycle estimates, rather than indulge solely in
local optimizations.
Exactly. And, Ole, I think Dave meant "local" in the
optimization sense, not the geographical one. There are
several issues with these kinds of numbers. First, in many
organizations, registration fees, travel expenses, and the
direct and/or marginal opportunity costs of people's time may
come out of sufficiently different budget pools to make the cost
of one much different from the cost of another even though the
number of Euros, Yen, Francs, Crowns, or Dollars (or whatever)
are the same. However, I'd guess that, whether it is measured
in marginal opportunity costs, lost income, or something in
between, the IETF average for a lost day is in the vicinity of
USD 1000 loaded. If we get even 1000 non-local attendees at a
meeting, adding an extra day in travel amounts to very
significant money --certainly not a lot smaller than what the
typical sponsor invests in a meeting.
Incidentally, is is those "lost time" costs that most concern
me. I'm worried about airplane and other connections, but far
more in terms of lost time and what people are expected to do
after getting off a long flight than in terms of any absolute
"hub airport" principle. From that point of view, the "hub
airport" principle is just a surrogate for some
harder-to-measure issues.
That is the reason why some of us are pushing back on these
topics: we wonder whether, in its effectively hidden
deliberations (that is not a statement about intent, only about
what the community can learn without complaining first), the
IAOC is overestimating the importance of the costs of facilities
and meeting overhead and underestimating the importance of the
costs to participants and/or their employers or sponsors. The
questions produced by those concerns are very important in these
times because, if a bad judgment on the IAOC's part is amplified
by the economy, we could have an attendance collapse. Were such
a thing to occur with current IETF budget models, knowing that a
sponsor contributed at lot to a given meeting would be scant
solace for the problems that would follow.
john
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf