Re: IETF Endowment update

[Suzanne Woolf <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

> On Jul 14, 2016, at 8:06 PM, John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> Regarding the concern that John Klensin raised about Internet organizations that have too much money, I
>> cannot imagine this endowmwnr being that successful.  However, if it were, I would argue for reduced
>> meeting fees to encourage the broadest possible participation in face-to-face meetings.
> 
> The IETF gets about 1/3 of its income from meeting fees.  If, as seems
> likely, we have more people coming electronically and fewer in person,
> we're going to need to replace the revenue since to a first
> approximation if we meet in person at all the costs are independent of
> the number of people that show up.  So either there's a death spiral
> of in-person meeting fees, we try to charge people who attend
> remotely, or we find the money somewhere else.  I see this as the
> obvious candidate for somewhere else.

Thanks John— this is very close to one of my main reasons for supporting the endowment. 

If we want to support diversity of participation and input to the IETF, we can’t do it only by having an ever-longer list of places where we have physical meetings. It’s expensive in many ways— time, money, tradeoffs among multiple values we care about. The pressures to clarify and evolve how we handle outreach, diversity, venue selection, and other aspects of making the IETF look like “the internet” are important. But I do think a sustainable IETF has to get better at the tools and practices to do distributed work more effectively.

Working group chairs, the tools team, the secretariat, and everyone else involved in making this whole endeavor go— which is to say all of us— are putting a lot of effort into such improvements. IMO we’ve got the will to do it. But it’s also going to cost money to get better at it— and getting better at it may, as John points out, also undercut the current funding sources.

In short— if we’re going to get better at distributed work, and cope effectively with the pressures on the IETF to change the purposes and priorities for its physical meetings, it seems to me that we need to separate our funding model from our ability to implement new working methods.

My other reason for supporting the endowment is a more philosophical one. For any organization, diversity of funding sources is good. Currently the IETF is significantly dependent on one organization (ISOC) and one industry (domain names). Some avenues to funding that other SDOs use aren’t really open to us— on principle if nothing else: for example, an endowment may be controversial, but I’d expect (and hope!) that charging for RFCs would be a complete non-starter.

Helping to assure diverse funding for the IETF is another way in which ISOC has helped the IETF and will continue to do so. Thank you Kathy and the ISOC Board.


Suzanne
(speaking for myself)