>> There is a direct contribution of US $2.2 million by the Internet >> Society next year. Is the plan to rely on Internet Society subsidies >> or to fix the deficit? One argument made was that the fees have not >> been increased over the last years. I'll point out that there hasn't >> been significant increase in paid attendance over the years. Either >> the IETF is only relevant to the usual folks or else the meetings are >> not made relevant enough for (new) people to attend. I am newcomer and not able to attend because most of meeting in America instead of Europe. > > I am repeatedly struck by how many new people *do* attend. > I don't know how long do they remain, for me I am feeling disapointed. > According to Russ's slides [1] 195/1098 are newcomers. And just to labour > the > point, a newcomer is not a returnee after 10 years, but someone who has > never > attended before. hope treated equal with all participants, > > This number (around 10%) seems consistent over all meetings. So naively, we > should be growing our attendance by around 300 per year. > agree > That we are not reflects our inability to retain, not our inability to > attract > (assuming that we are not completely refreshing the IETF attendance every > three > or four years). Should not be rocket science to follow up with some > newcomers to > find out why they only attend once and never come back. > For me I still did n't attend but understand that many old participants are biased and there seems no equal opportunity, people don't always follow the IETF mission and procedure, they just follow their ways as long there was no complain. I call all newcomers to open a new WG and start complaining because we have to discuss why we were disapointed of the IETF and IESG, and even the Internet Society. Please note that I will focus my volunteering work in complaining and fixing the discourage I found so far. AB