Re: Are IETF meeting fees exclusionary? (Was: Registration open for IETF 114)

[Michael Douglass <[e-mail]>]

I suspect focusing on details such as attendance fees etc is missing the 
point.

This article provides an interesting viewpoint and appears well researched.

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-virtual-conferences-environment-inclusive.html

For some - the cost of attendance (fees, lodging, travel, time away from 
family) is worth what they get out of it. For many any or all of those 
prevents attendance. It's not the attendance fees that are exclusionary 
- it's the whole deal.

Even if the entire cost was covered there are still cases as mentioned 
in that paper:

> In addition to cost, in-person events also require tremendous 
> investments in time. These events require travel, often last multiple 
> days, and take up all of attendees' time while they are there.

> This can be a major challenge, particularly for women. For many 
> younger workers, this period of life tends to fall around the time 
> many are having children. This makes getting away to conferences 
> challenging for women, said Faust, who also has two young children.
So I think there's no doubt about the exclusionary nature of in-person 
meetings. The question is what if anything is to be done?

I'm not trying to offer solutions here - nor even point any fingers. I 
suspect there's no one answer and there probably has to be compromise.

On 5/13/22 07:41, Jay Daley wrote:
> [Switching to admin-discuss]
>
> Hi Anupam
>
>> On 13 May 2022, at 04:25, Anupam Agrawal <[e-mail]> 
>> wrote:
>>
>> At one point in time, meeting fees possibly was the only way to cover 
>> the costs of IETF and USD 600 was justified.
>
> How far back are you referring to?  ISOC has been contributing 
> financially every year to the IETF since 1995 [1] so the last year I 
> am aware of this being possibly correct was 1994.
>
>> Even more was  justified even though at the risk of being 
>> exclusionary. Survival is important than optics.
>>
>> But now, As on Dec-20, IETF LLC had 19M USD (19,301,645 $) in stock 
>> investments yielding 2M USD in Investment income. Any stock market 
>> invest has a risk attached to it. Interestingly, the auditor points 
>> out that IETF bank deposits of 477K USD is beyond the insurable limit 
>> and thus has a risk.
>>
>> https://www.ietf.org/media/documents/2020_Audited_Financials.pdf
>
> I don’t understand what relevance our current investment risk profile 
> has to this issue?
>
>>
>> Possibly an opportunity to correct the exclusionary trend.
>
> Do you have any data on this exclusionary trend?
>
> It’s not clear to me what possibility you see here, but I think you 
> are suggesting a reduction in the meeting fee rather than say travel 
> grants.  When this has been discussed previously, multiple community 
> members have noted that the fee is a relatively small part of the 
> total cost of meeting participation in comparison to travel and 
> accommodation.  It is therefore questionable as to what benefit would 
> be achieved by always running our meetings at a loss if the effect on 
> participation was marginal.
>
> [1] 
> https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-of-the-internet/ietf-internet-society/
>
>>
>> --
>> Anupam
>>
>>> On 10-May-2022, at 9:10 AM, George Michaelson <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I used a US inflation calculator. in 2007 IETF registration cost $600.
>>> 2022 would be $830 if it simply kept pace with the CPI adjustment to
>>> the dollar.
>>>
>>> So the "$700 is reasonable" has a basis in 15 years practie. When did
>>> we become so exclusionary? at least 15 years ago.
>>>
>>> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/JUByvYCkSb2WDSt9h4lDkaoe9gc/
>>>
>>> -G
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 1:17 PM Keith Moore 
>>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 5/9/22 23:07, John Levine wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Could you give us a specific dollar limit for a reasonable price?
>>>>
>>>> This is going to vary a lot from one person to another, but offhand I'd
>>>> say that $1000/meeting for hotel and entry fee combined (not including
>>>> travel) is a good goal for meetings in North America.
>>>>
>>>> The early bird fee is $700.  $300 for a week's hotel?
>>>>
>>>> Why is $700 reasonable either?   How have we let IETF become so 
>>>> exclusionary?   Is that really consistent with IETF's mission?
>>>>
>>>> Even if we tried to go the cheap route and find a college campus
>>>> that would host us for free, when I look for places near our
>>>> local campus they're a lot more than $75/night.
>>>>
>>>> I don't know where you're from.   But I know many places where 
>>>> decent, safe, clean rooms can be had for around $75/night. 
>>>>   Granted, they're less likely to be in large cities, but sometimes 
>>>> they're within reasonable commuting distance of city centers.
>>>>
>>>> Keith
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
> -- 
> Jay Daley
> IETF Executive Director
> [e-mail]
>