I have been attending Singapore IETF meetings remotely. I also remotely attended one IETF meeting in Berlin, as a result of a passport issue that came up immediately before the meeting. There is a cost, since in any Time Zone, that can mean attending meetings at ridiculous o'Clock. With Singapore, for example, the offset is such that I would be attending meetings between the hours of 9 PM and 7 AM. That cost can be quite high, since you are effectively available all day for your paying gig - leading to very long days. There is also a cost in the sense that remote attendees are at a distinct disadvantage at IETF meetings, largely because they are mostly outnumbered by the folks who are not attending remotely. Discussions take place and sometimes decisions are made that do not typically involve remote attendees. Also, however hard people might try not to, it is often easy to ignore remote attendees at least to some extent. There is at least one additional cost - to the industry and to the effectiveness of the IETF (or any other SDO) in developing useful and timely standards - associated with the loss of the distinct advantages in cooperation, conflict resolution and consensus building that most people recognize as being primarily achievable via face-to-face discussion. Also the current no-fee remote attendance is explicitly a temporary policy. A major shift in the balance toward remote attendance would reduce the advantages of physical attendance, reducing the disadvantages of remote attendance (quite possibly significantly), but would most likely result in a need to impose an attendance fee for remote attendance to defray IETF operating costs. Unless we were trying to reduce the costs to nearer to zero (by - perhaps - targeting an increase in attendance by two or more orders of magnitude), the cost per attendee would be within an order of magnitude of the same as it is now. Strangely, using the current remote attendance as a "proof of concept" that very low cost IETF participation is usefully achievable in anything like near term reminds me a great deal of similar claims made about other ideas where some might try to extrapolate the results of significant deployment from a relatively small experimental basis. -----Original Message----- From: Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia - FR/Paris-Saclay) <julien.maisonneuve@xxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 2:18 PM To: Eric Gray <eric.gray@xxxxxxxxxxxx>; Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: RE: We gotta stop meeting like this Importance: High > There is value in having to pass some form of "is it worth it" test - no matter who will be actually paying for it. Doesn't remote meeting participation show some sort of counter-argument ? Cost is zero, and I haven't noted much disruption in current meetings (though that would be possible). Julien. -----Original Message----- From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Eric Gray Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 5:19 PM To: Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: RE: We gotta stop meeting like this Look at the impact of near-zero cost mailing (in the form of E-Mail) on the tremendous volume of trash we all receive, even after filtering, and extend that to zero cost participation in the IETF. There is value in having to pass some form of "is it worth it" test - no matter who will be actually paying for it. -----Original Message----- From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Keith Moore Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 11:12 AM To: ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: Re: We gotta stop meeting like this On 7/23/19 10:48 AM, Eric Gray wrote: > I would also point out that zero (or near zero) cost participation should not be a goal. I disagree. But perhaps you would care to explain why you believe this?
