--On Sunday, 18 August, 2013 08:33 -0400 Hadriel Kaplan <hadriel.kaplan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > And it does cost the IETF lots of money to host the physical > meetings, and that cost is directly proportional to the number > of physical attendees. More attendees = more cost. I had promised myself I was finished with this thread, but I can't let this one pass. (1) If IETF pays separately for the number of meeting rooms, the cost is proportionate to the number of parallel sessions, not the number of attendees. (2) If IETF gets the meeting rooms (small and/or large) for "free", the costs are borne by the room rates of those who stay in the hotel and are not proportionate to much of anything (other than favoring meetings that will draw the negotiated minimum number of attendees who stay in that hotel). (3) Equipment costs are also proportional to the number of meetings we run in parallel. Since IASA owns some of the relevant equipment and has to ship it to meetings, there are some amortization issues with those costs and shipping costs are dependent on distance and handling charges from wherever things are stored between meetings (I assume somewhere around Fremont, California, USA). If that location was correct and we wanted to minimize those charges, we would hold all meetings in the San Francisco area or at least in the western part of the USA. In any event the costs are in no way proportionate to the number of attendees. (4) The costs of the Secretariat and RFC Editor contracts and other associated contracts and staff are relatively fixed. A smaller organization, with fewer working groups and less output, might permit reducing the size of those contracts somewhat, but that has only the most indirect and low-sensitively relationship to the number of attendees, nothing near "proportional". (5) If we have to pay people in addition to Secretariat staff to, e.g., sit at registration desks, that bears some monotonic relationship to the number of attendees. But the step increments in that participate function are quite large, nothing like "directly proportional". (6) The cost of cookies and other refreshments may indeed be proportional to the number of attendees but, in most facilities, that proportionality will come in large step functions. In addition, in some places, costs will rise with the number of "unusual" dietary requirements. The number of those requirements might increase with the number of attendees, but nowhere near proportionately. "Unusual" is entirely in the perception of the supplier/facility but, from a purely economic and cost of meetings standpoint, the IETF might be better off if people with those needs stayed home or kept their requirements to themselves. So, meeting "cost directly proportional to the number of physical attendees"? Nope. best, john p.s. You should be a little cautious about a "charge the big companies more" policy. I've seen people who make the financial decisions as to who comes say things like "we pay more by virtue of sending more people, if they expect us to spend more per person, we will make a point by cutting back on those we send (or requiring much stronger justifications for each one who wants to go)". I've also seen reactions that amount to "We are already making a big voluntary donation that is much higher than the aggregate of the registration fees we are paying, one that small organizations don't make. If they want to charge us more because we are big, we will reduce or eliminate the size of that donation." Specific company examples on request (but not on-list), but be careful what you wish for.