Re: Specific Questions about Registration details for IETF 108

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

John

> On 9/06/2020, at 7:11 AM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Similarly, the LLC Board, as I have understood it, is supposed
> to be responsible for thinking about things strategically and to
> be at least minimally accountable to the community for that
> thinking.  We aren't seeing much evidence of strategic thinking
> and planning that should have, IMO, been well underway in March.
> Instead, we are seeing announcements of fees and associated
> arrangements with the same "emergency", "we have decided", and
> "no time to consult the community, even about principles"
> discussion we saw in March.

I think you are significantly underestimating the level of work that we have had to put into planning in a very short time in response to a global crisis that has taken a new trajectory almost every week.  

One of the first things we had to do was to establish a sound foundation on which to assess if an in-person meeting can go ahead or not - the go/no-go framework.  If you recall, that was not a simple matter and took a lot of work to produce and a fair amount of community engagement.

The second thing was to understand what the community wanted of an online meeting - what it should contain, how it should be structured, when it should operate and so on - without time for the community to deliver that as consensus guidance.  That was addressed through the survey, which was a very large piece of work.  At that stage we needed to know what form of meeting, if any, we were expected to operate before we could work out costs/sponsorship/fees, and so only one question in the survey addressed fees.  (I’m glossing over the different responsibilities of the IESG and LLC in this as they're not relevant to the key points about resourcing and dependencies).

Yes, we could have started earlier to unpick the issues of principle around charging and the practical impact of some of the edge cases, and that’s on me for not being familiar enough yet to understand the need for that.  Other than the one prescient comment on list in March [1] there was no mention of this in the community that might have alerted me otherwise.

Having said that, I’m not sure it would have been wise for the LLC to lead that.  You may have seen from the Many Couches list that a few people including the IETF Chair drafted a proposed charter [2] some weeks ago for a new WG (Stay Home Move Online) to look at all of these issues and provide community guidance to the IESG and LLC, though including fees in the scope came later [3].  This is the best approach by far as the guidance is consensus guidance and because it ensures that we don’t run into a tail-wagging-dog scenario if instead the LLC had led that conversation.

Jay

[1]  https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/JPJQkY93oeaDKX9L0Li-YIjyQ4k/
[2]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-shmo/ 
[3]  https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/manycouches/qkUNflWL1XcxGxrtu8XVvGqdeQQ/


-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[e-mail]