Re: [tsvwg] travel funds for ietf for the next SCE talk?

Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Fri, 10 May 2019 19:45:56 -0400

    On 5/10/19 4:33 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

        And this has been a problem since the early 1990s when the US government stopped subsidizing the meetings (and perhaps also the secretariat?).   But I wish we'd try harder to find that sustainability model rather than constantly punting the problem, because the Internet has been suffering for all that time from a lack of diverse participation in IETF.

      I don't see how the IETF is supposed to fix the fact that independent open source developers are, um, independent. 

    This reply seems to presume that "independent" developers should
      be considered by IETF to be the exceptional case, and only 
      "dependent" developers (presumably those funded by huge
      corporations) have a right to sit at the big table.   I think it
      should be the other way around - IETF should be optimized to
      facilitate contributions from independent parties, and those with
      sponsorship are welcome to sit at the same table as everyone
      else.   

      There was a time when IETF was more like this, even after we had
      to pay our own meeting costs.   We got sucked into the mode of
      holding meetings at expensive hotels, especially after our
      attendance figures pushed into the multiple thousands and they
      were the only venues available other than conference centers
      (which were even more expensive).   It got even harder after IETF
      started meeting in more diverse locations (which it should have
      done, and which I supported).  But I also saw various efforts to
      raise the bar on participation and discourage the independents.

      It seems to me that the current focus on improving remote attendance facilities is really the best we can do, but again: if remote attendance really becomes as good as on-site attendance, the number of funded atttendees will rapidly decline.

I think that if there was a viable answer to this problem, we'd already have found it.

    I wonder whether if the organization had looked for an answer,
      we'd have already found it.
    But conditions have changed and keep changing.    Remote
      participation is more feasible today than in the past.   And our
      attendance numbers are down from the late 1990s period which
      should give us some additional flexibility about venues.  

    I wonder if it's possible to rely less on face-to-face meetings,
      while still having them (because personal contact is still very
      valuable to enabling people to collaborate at a distance), and
      make the face-to-face meetings less expensive (maybe by making
      them shorter and more focused on facilitating the personal
      interaction that really helps people work well remotely.)   

    A tremendous amount of participants' time is wasted at our
      current meetings by making Powerpoint (and similar) presentations
      the normal mode of working group sessions.   Before we used
      Powerpoint, our in-person discussions were much more
      productive.    And that could help us make the meetings shorter
      and more useful at the same time.

      Perhaps we can't completely level the playing field but there's
      plenty of room to do better.
    Keith