Wow. Time for a reality check. So, we've gone from a discussion of additional travel time in the 2-4 hour range to an entire "lost day" in the USD 1000 range for someone on your side of the Atlantic?? I hate to sound sarcastic, but last time I checked, we are not a group of in-court lawyers, house builders, or craftsmen. Last time I checked, most of the participants in the IETF are perfectly capable of working "offline," heck I've even seen some people reading those pesky Internet Drafts ON PAPER, while a very large number of us seem to be in possesion of portable devices with various communication capabilities, even if some of that communication is temporarily disabled by air travel. Do you remember the early days of the IETF, waiting for the "terminal room" to open, or perhaps even earlier when said room was a small computing center at a University? How could we possibly have survived? In the words of Chopper Reed, I think we need to HTFU ;-) [YouTube is your friend] Ole Ole J. Jacobsen Editor and Publisher, The Internet Protocol Journal Cisco Systems Tel: +1 408-527-8972 Mobile: +1 415-370-4628 E-mail: ole@xxxxxxxxx URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj On Sun, 24 May 2009, John C Klensin wrote: > 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