--On Tuesday, May 28, 2019 21:29 -0400 Michael StJohns <mstjohns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 5/28/2019 6:49 PM, Keith Moore wrote: >> On 5/28/19 4:35 PM, Michael StJohns wrote: >... > 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. >... Mike, I mostly agree, but have a different take on this, involving two other pieces of the same reality. As participation costs [1] rise, it becomes harder for people without enterprise (profit or non-profit) support to attend f2f meetings. For those of us with healthy consulting practices or significant non-occupational income, retirement income, or other reserves, attendance becomes a matter of personal or business priorities. For people operating as individuals and closer to the edge, the choice may be one of feasibility. As a personal example, I've got some health issues that drive up minimum costs, but there have been years when I was attending substantially all meetings f2f in which the annual IETF bill came to USD 30K- 40K. Even if one can get by at half or a third of that by cutting various costs, we still are not talking about chump change. It would be good to have actual numbers, although I'm not confident that many of us would want to disclose the details of our support situations to the community (or even the Secretariat), but my strong suspicion is the percentage of people actually participating as individuals -- on our own wallets with no enterprise/organization support -- is dropping relative to those who can depend on organizational money for travel support, registration fees, and maybe even a salary while at IETF or doing IETF work. To the extent that is the case, it turns the model of participation by individuals into a convenient myth. Of course, organizations differ hugely about what, if anything, people they support to participate in the IETF are expected to do in return. We've seen the full spectrum from "go there, do your thing, and don't pay any attention to any relationships to your day job" to clear corporate policies about positions employees are expected to take or avoid in the IETF, rewards for particular IETF-related actions or accomplishments, and so on. However, I suggest that even the potential for a company to hold people accountable for what they do in the IETF makes those people different from our traditional story (myth ?) about individual participation. That myth is, IMO, dangerous for at least three reasons. One is that reasoning from the assumption that changing a model that doesn't exist in practice would fundamentally change the IETF may get in the way or clear thinking about alternatives, including financial alternatives. Second, noting that participating as an IESG, IAB, etc., member is even more expensive than participating as an ordinary contributor, if our decision bodies come to be dominated by people with strong organizational support, sensitivity to cost and related issues by those who actually make the decisions may be reduced. Finally, many of our policies and procedures are designed around the assumption of individual participation and the related assumption of no coordinated organizational influence. Should the IETF, as a standards developer ever get itself embroiled in claims that particular standards decisions were made because of undue organizational influences and that those decisions distorted the market for certain products, our failure to have policies and procedures in place to control that risk -- and our presumed claim that we don't need them because everyone participates as an individual would be more likely to fail a laugh test the more unbalanced the participant profile gets. >... > 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? >... Well, I don't know how much it would help and we have built systems that would cause it to take a long time for any changes to show significant effects (maybe another symptom of the "individual participation" myth), but we could also think about some ways to cut costs and how much they would save. As examples, (i) Raise the threshold for creating a new WG, keeping a WG going, and/or giving WGs meeting time slots, or restrict the number of WGs to the point that we could reduce the number of days the IETF meets and/or the number of meeting rooms needed in parallel. Reducing the number of days meetings last would reduce the number of hotel nights people had to pay for and perhaps even the number of hotel nights for staff the IETF, ISOC, etc., needed to pay for. Reducing the number of parallel meeting rooms required might broaden the range of facilities we could consider and thereby permit lower-cost meeting site choices. (ii) Consider whether, with increasing use of interim meetings, we could reduce the number of all-IETF meetings from three to two. This would presumably reduce annual travel, hotel, and other costs for both participants and staff and might help broaden participation by allowing at least some participants to spend a larger fraction of the year at their day jobs. (iii) Push back aggressively on small group meetings in parallel with IETF. IIR, we used to require between three and four small meeting rooms: IAB and IESG (sometimes sharing one dedicated space), a work area for the Secretariat, and maybe something else like the Nomcom. Anything else was required to take it elsewhere or meet in ordinary hotel rooms (or rooms of members of the leadership who were given complementary upgrades to suites under hotel contracts); we even aggressively discouraged other groups or company gatherings in the meeting hotel. I gather the number of such spaces that are "required" has increased very significantly. Given the complexities of hotel contracts I am not sure that cutting the number back down would lower costs for a given facility, but such a decrease would increase the number of facilities that could be considered, leaving us less at the mercy of facilities large enough to accommodate our increasing needs and more able to negotiate more attractive facility contracts. I note that each of the above has been proposed in the past, at least the first to the point of I-Ds proposing different variations. What they have in common is that the IESG (and/or IASA) have been unwilling to take them up. There are others that might be worth considering although I'd predict they would be even less likely to go anywhere: (iv) Push back on IAB, IESG, or other "retreats" that require additional travel, sometimes four weeks a year away from home rather than three, and staff support and travel. These increase costs and decrease the number and diversity of people who can volunteer to serve in leadership positions. Sometimes they are worth it, but the community's uncritical acceptance of them as regular events may imply that we are not paying enough attention to cost control (or that those will large travel and expense accounts don't notice the costs or don't care). (v) And, yes, we could attack the cookie budget by, e.g., creating an extra charge for snack breaks. Given the nature of hotel contracts, it is not clear how much that would save, but making it negotiable would increase our ability to control costs and promote competition among candidate facilities. Those are just examples. If we were serious about cost reductions, we could probably come up with others. I suggest that "we" are no serious and that, in some respects, the increase in remote participation has reduced the incentives to control costs because someone who can't afford to travel to all f2f meetings just stops doing so. However, that seems to me to be reducing the diversity of the IETF's leadership, making the idea of participation as individuals more or a fiction, and turning the IETF more into a body where participation and leadership is by large and well-funded organizations even though we keep trying to hide and deny that. >>> 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. >... To turn this around a bit, maybe we should accept that who we claim to be is getting less true even if has yet to disappear entirely. If we want to be a body that matches our claims, we need to figure out what we are willing to pay (in cost reductions, changes in workload, and adjustments to leadership and overhead structures) to get that back and retain it. I am not holding my breath. best, john [1] That is costs as seen by those individual participants, i.e., not just the registration fee but the sum of that, plus travel expenses (air, hotel, meals, visa application fees and associated travel when necessary, etc.), maybe plus lost income or other opportunity costs when our individual sources of income or other support make that relevant.
