ietf meeting fees

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

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.

> 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.  :-)

(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?)

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.

I'm not accustomed to designing conferences, so if you want details, 
perhaps suggest what kinds of details are needed?

Keith