--On Friday, August 16, 2013 15:46 -0400 Hadriel Kaplan <hadriel.kaplan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Aug 16, 2013, at 1:53 PM, John C Klensin > <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > >> (1) As Dave points out, this activity has never been free. >> The question is only about "who pays". If any participants >> have to pay >> (or convince their companies to pay) and others, as a matter >> of categories, do not, that ultimately weakens the process >> even if, most of the time, those who pay don't expect or get >> favored treatment. Having some participants get a "free >> ride" that really comes at the expense of other participants >> (and potentially competing organizations) is just not a >> healthy idea. > > Baloney. People physically present still have an advantage > over those remote, no matter how much technology we throw at > this. That's why corporations are willing to pay their > employees to travel to these meetings. And it's why people > are willing to pay out-of-pocket for it too, ultimately. It's > why people want a day-pass type thing for only attending one > meeting, instead of sitting at home attending remote. > > Being there is important, and corporations and people know it. Sure. And it is an entirely separate issue, one which I don't know how to solve (if it can be solved at all). It is unsolvable in part because corporations --especially the larger and more successful ones-- make their decisions about what to participate in, at what levels, and with whatever choices of people, for whatever presumably-good business reasons they do so. I can, for example, remember one such corporation refusing to participate in a standards committee that was working on something that many of us thought was key to their primary product. None us knew, then or now, why they made that decision although their was wide speculation at the time that they intended to deliberately violate the standard that emerged and wanted plausible deniability about participation. Lots of reasons; lots of circumstances. > An audio input model (ie, conference call model) still > provides plenty of advantage to physical attendees, while also > providing remote participants a chance to have their say in a > more emphatic and real-time format. We're not talking about > building a telepresence system for all remote participants, or > using robots as avatars. IIR, we've tried audio input. It works really well for conference-sized meetings (e.g., a dozen or two dozen people around a table) with a few remote participants. It works really well for a larger group (50 or 100 or more) and one or two remote participants. I've even co-chaired IETF WG meetings remotely that way (with a lot of help and sympathy from the other co-chair or someone else taking an in-room leadership role). But, try it for several remote participants and a large room full of people, allow for audio delays in both directions, and about the last thing one needs is a bunch of disembodied voices coming out of the in-room audio system at times that are not really coordinated with what is going on in the room. Now it can all certainly be made to work: it takes a bit of coordination on a chat (or equivalent) channel, requests to get in or out of the queue that are monitored from within the room, and someone managing those queues along with the mic lines. But, by that point, many of the disadvantage of audio input relative to someone reading from Jabber have disappeared and the other potential problems with audio input -- noise, level setting, people who are hard to understand even if they are in the room, and so on-- start to dominate. Would I prefer audio input to typing into Jabber under the right conditions? Sure, in part because, while I type faster than average it still isn't fast enough to compensate for the various delays. But it really isn't a panacea for any of the significant problems. >> (2) Trying to figure out exactly what remote participation >> (equipment, staffing, etc.) will cost the IETF and then trying >> to assess those costs to the remote participants would be >> madness for multiple reasons. [...snip...] > > Yet you're proposing charging remote participants to bear the > costs. I'm confused. I am proposing charging remote participants a portion of the overhead costs of operating the IETF, _not_ a fee based on the costs of supporting remote participation. And, again, I want them to have the option of deciding how much of it they can reasonably afford to pay. >... best, john