On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 02:25:30PM -0400, Donald Eastlake wrote: > TOn Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 10:46 AM Eric Burger > <eburger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > IEEE: $3,500 (corporate membership; individuals are <$100 but don’t get to be on the BoG) > > The level you are talking about does not make standards. IEEE > Standards Association Standards Projects can have voting either by > individual or organization and are numbered, including the possibility > of sub-numbering. So, for example, to take a project with which I have > some familiarity, there is IEEE 802. It has Working Groups like 802.1 > and 802.11, both of which I have, at times, been a voting member. All > 802 WGs use individual membership and, I believe, have roughly the > same voting membership qualification which involves attending a couple > of meetings within a time period of 1 1/3 years. And "attending" is > not loosey-goosey, like with the IETF. At least for 802.11, which > meets for a week 6 times a year, you have to be at a session for 75% > of the session time slots during the week. You can't just drop by for > a day or the like. See > http://www.ieee802.org/11/abt80211.html#membership > And, little of the work is done on mailing list. More is done on > teleconferences, depending on how busy a project is, but a lot of the > work is done face-to-face at the 6 week long meetings per year so you > have to at least attend most of them to be effective and most active > participants attend virtually all of them. The same is true for the T13 standards committee, for which I've been participating in the past year for to try to standard commands to manage disk drives that can non-destructively switch between SMR and CMR recording modes. If you want to participate, you have to attend in person; some of the locations don't have reliable internet, so even if they wanted to allow remote participation (which they don't), it wouldn't be possible at some of the host facilities. In order to vote the organization has to send a representative to two out of every three plenary meetings, and vote on every other letter ballot (where voting on a letter ballot requires review work and commenting similar to what an AD does on a I-D before he or she votes on it, or what a peer reviewer does when reviewing a paper for a conference.) I can state with pretty high confidence it is *far* more expensive, especially once you include the software engineering time taken up by 5+ face-to-face meetings/year, to participate in a standards effort hosted by T13 compared to the IETF, where mailing list partiicipation is at least an option. (I also could talk about how horrible their mailing list infrastructure is --- the basic rule is that they don't have anyone actively looking after it, so if the web site freezes, wait for a few hours, and hopefully the windows server will self-reboot and recover. Suffice it to say that IETF'ers should be thankful the next time you might be tempted to complain that the IETF web services team hasn't implemented some minor feature that you want. :-) - Ted
