On Oct 25, 2011, at 8:55 AM, Ping Pan wrote: > the original issue remains: please make IETF meetings easier and cheaper for us to go to. ;-) I think that a lot of people would like that. There are a number of problems that need to be solved to make them cheaper to attend. One is the issue of air fare and hotel cost; these have been brought up before. 25 years ago, all meetings were in the US, as were most of the participants. People came from Europe and Australia at significantly greater cost, but for the average attendee, putting all meetings in the US reduced meeting cost. It's now 25 years later, and that logic doesn't remotely start to work. From my perspective, the best we can do in that regard is place meetings somewhere that some of our participants come from and is less expensive than other choices for remote attendees - if we place the meeting far from everyone, it will cost more for the average attendee than if we at least put it near *someone* that is likely to attend. Here's a thought for you. Folks have periodically proposed that all meetings happen at the large international airports, the hubs in the transportation system. That reduces transportation costs by putting the meeting somewhere that everyone can relatively-easily get to. What hotels do you find in those airports, what do they cost, and what do they offer? We could, for example, put the next IETF at Frankfurt Am Mein, and have everyone stay in the Sheraton Frankfurt - or not. We could all go to Narita, and try to hold a meeting in the $40 hotels near it - or not. It turns out that if you're trying to reduce cost, you go somewhere that isn't the hub of the transport network. That gives you a lot more options, and often options that you might actually prefer. Something that *can* help there is to not require the hotel to be in/by the conference center. The "one roof" rule tends to mean that we select many-star hotels. Tell us that we can put the people in one place and the meeting somewhere else, and people can choose less-star hotels if they like. Another issue relates to the conference center itself. We routinely have nine breakout sessions going at once, hold receptions, deliver coffee and cookies, and have meetings with 1000 people in a room. That means that we look for conference centers that can host those meetings. 25 years ago, the usual solution was for the host to donate the use of their own conference facilities (my wife still mentions the fact that we had a meeting at the University of Hawaii Honolulu and I spent an entire week in Hawaii indoors); when we became larger than 500 people and needed more than a handful of rooms at once, that got hard. Practical solutions that either reduce the room requirements or make for ways they can be donated might help. Go to the beach? Oh, by the way, the conference cost is a deal, a horse-trade. If we meet in a conference center separate from hotel space, we can't offer the place room nights as a trade-off against meeting space, which means that both costs tend to go up. I think something helpful to reduce the attendance fee would be to find a way to provide corporate sponsors to underwrite the cost. An issue we routinely have is that corporate sponsors want to be selling something, and the engineers that make a competitor's product aren't usually potential customers. Also, the companies that are likely to do so tend to have a number of attendees, and can do the math - sponsorships come out of a single budget, while attendance fees come out of departmental budgets, but the sum is the same. The companies that routinely help out one way or another also tend to feel that it's someone else's turn to be generous. Ideas there would be helpful. So, here's something you can do that would actually help. Tell us how to reduce not the price of cookies or the price of the hotel room, but the price of the entire meeting as viewed by the average attendee. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf