Re: Charging remote participants

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On 08/16/2013 11:36 AM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote:
On Aug 16, 2013, at 10:56 AM, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket.
This isn't about "fairness" or equal-pain-for-all.  It's about getting work done and producing good output.  Whether someone remote has to pay $0 or $1000 won't change your $3.5k out-of-pocket expense.  If you don't feel the $3.5k was worth it for you to go physically, don't go.

I'm all about having IETF get work done and produce good output. May I suggest that we start by trying to reduce IETF's longstanding bias in favor of large companies with large travel budgets that pay disproportionate attention to narrow and/or short-term interests, and against academics and others who take a wider and/or longer view? The Internet has suffered tremendously due to a lack of a long-term view in IETF.

To that end, I'd like to see IETF do what it can to reduce meeting costs for those who attend face-to-face, rather than increase those costs even more in order to subsidize remote participation.

I have reached the difficult (i.e. expensive) conclusion that the only way to participate effectively in IETF (except perhaps in a narrow focus area) is to regularly attend face-to-face meetings. There are several reasons for this, just a few of which (off the top of my head) are:

(1) It's really hard to understand where people are coming from unless/until you've met them in person. I had been participating in IETF for about a year before I showed up at my first meeting, and I still remember how (2) It's much easier to get a sense of how a group of people react to a proposal in person, than over email. (3) For several reasons, people seem to react to ideas more favorably when discussed face-to-face. (4) It's easier to get along well with people whom you see face-to-face on at least an occasional basis, so people whom you've met face-to-face are more likely to appreciate constructive suggestions and to interpret technical criticism as helpful input rather than personal attacks. (5) Among the many things that hallway conversations are good for are quickly settling misunderstandings and resolving disputes.

I realize that a better remote participation experience might help with some or all of these, but I think we're decades away from being able to realize that quality of experience via remote participation, at least without developing new technology and spending a lot more money on equipment. If someone wants to fund development of that technology and purchase of that equipment separately from the normal IETF revenue stream, more power to them. But I do suspect that at some point it will cost money to maintain that technology and equipment, and again, I suspect it shouldn't primarily come from people who are paying to be there in person.

Or if we're really about trying to make IETF as open as possible, then we should be willing to publicly declare that people can participate in face-to-face meetings without paying the registration fee. [*] But I don't think that IETF's current funding model can support that. So maybe IAOC should give serious thought to changing the model, but offhand I don't know what a better model would be. Should IETF become a membership organization, and let some of the administrative costs be borne by membership fees, so that meeting costs can more accurately reflect the cost of hosting meetings? How would the organization provide benefits to paying members without excluding participation from others? I don't expect that there are any obviously right answers to questions like those - everything involves compromise - but it might be that there are far better answers to those questions than those that have been assumed for the past 20 years or so.

[*] I do realize that some people have, on occasion, shown up as "tourists" for the benefit of hallway and bar conversations, and avoided paying the meeting fee.





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