On 5/28/2019 6:49 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 5/28/19 4:35 PM, Michael StJohns wrote:
PS - like it or not, meeting fees provide a substantial amount of the
money for the general IETF budget specifically including standards
publication.
It's a given that there has to be some way to pay the bills. But if
we have so much inertia around this way of raising revenue that it
makes IETF less and less relevant over time, maybe IETF should address
this problem sooner rather than later. No organization can hope to
remain viable if it refuses to even consider adapting to changing
conditions.
IMO - it's not inertia as much as reality. In the current "we don't
have members" and "we don't charge for standards" model, we have three
funding sources: meeting fees, sponsor contributions (both meeting and
sustaining), and checks from the parents ... I mean ISOC
contributions. We could become more like other standards
organizations by charging for either or both of membership (student,
researcher, personal, corporate etc) and copies of the standards, but I
grok that either of those changes could change the fundamentals of the
IETF in a way that could make us *less* viable or relevant. We could
add another funding path - endowments - but that requires someone(s)
with a particular skillset and a really big rolodex and usually some
quid pro quo's in the toolbox to get money put into the endowment - and
I don't see the IETF naming buildings for contributors anytime soon.
I'm sure there are other vaguely related ways we could make money, but
they all will require a startup investment of time and money, and an
ongoing investment in interest from the IETF community. I'm having
problems figuring what those might be.
So in the current model we can a) charge higher meeting fees, b) get
more sponsorship, and c) ask ISOC for a bigger check. None of these
wells are bottomless. We could reduce expenditures - but what would you
cut? Meeting related munchies and internet? Remote access bandwidth?
Staff costs? Tools support? Standards production?
If you are arguing for actions that reduce or tend to reduce or have
the potential to limit the intake of funds from that model, I suggest
you also come up with a more than handwaving proposal for how to
replace those funds or explain which functions supported by the IETF
we're going to eliminate to cover such shortfall.
Perhaps we should also require more than handwaving reasons for
staying the same. :-)
See above - it's really just a question of who we want to be and what
we're willing to pay to become that. If you can tell me who we want to
be, I can help you with figuring out what it's going to cost in time,
reputation, angst, etc.
(There's a familiar set of arguments for staying the same: If you
don't provide a detailed proposal, it's labeled handwaving. If you do
provide a detailed proposal, it's easy to pick it apart as naive
because it hasn't yet benefited from broad exposure and feedback. Or
is there no longer any place for brainstorming in IETF?)
Most of the money proposals have been "why can't we do X - it won't cost
much" without "I think company C might be willing to fund X if we do Y
as well" or "if we charge $10 more on the meeting fee, we can recoup the
cost and there's enough interest to do that with minimal whining about
expensive meeting fees" or similar thoughts. I'm looking for at least
some understanding that nothing is free and that (probably) someone
isn't just going to write a check to cover costs.
In the instant case what I mean by enough detail is to do: 1) propose a
functional change in enough detail that you can do (2), 2) analyze
approximately how much it will cost us (additional expenditure and/or
lost income), 3) figure out if it can be covered using current
resources, 4) whether the change has priority over other calls on the
funding, and 5) if 3 or 4 is "no" is there another source of funding
available? 6) if (5) is "n", exit or revise (1) and repeat.
I do suspect that there's likely a market for technical conferences
that serve as a more effective way for IT and operations people to
keep abreast of standards development and also to provide feed-forward
about the problems that they are having and which need to be
addressed. And that such conferences might also attract more "doers"
to IETF.
Even better - sell the rights to a technical conference company to show
up and do their own dog and pony show - with... wait for it ...
conference fees. Why reinvent this or try and do it ourselves? Of
course there will be unintended consequences - we'll have to find venues
that can handle larger crowds for example which will lock us out of some
of our current locales and definitely limit us in seeking out new
locations. Then there's the "we want to make money" vs "we think this
country you want to go to has some [human rights | LGBT | political |
visa | pollution | etc] problems and the IETF standards folk don't want
to go" dichotomy between a for-profit technical conference and .. us.
Seriously - we've had problems with Bits and Bytes and diverging
expectations - so I'm not sure how to reconcile the more mercenary "make
money by giving presentations" with the usual IETF ... bohemian(?)
approach to technology.
I'm not accustomed to designing conferences, so if you want details,
perhaps suggest what kinds of details are needed?
I have no desire to design a conference nor to turn IETF standards
meetings into them. Find someone to build a marketing plan that says we
could make money that way and maybe it could become more interesting to
me. That's probably what you need if you want to go the conference
route - but I'd be surprised if it was viable.
Later, Mike
Keith
