Re: ietf meeting fees

[Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>]

Keith Moore <[e-mail]> 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.

a) The meetings are not as "profitable" as they once were.

b) At this point, the November Asia meetings are not profitable at all, and from what I
   understand are now being planned on that assumption.  Some speculate that
   a March Asia meeting might do better, but that experiment is a few years
   away, and as yet, to my knowledge, unscheduled.
   March 2022 is the first spring where it could happen.
   (Same speculate that summer asia meeting would be intolerably warm.)

c) my understanding of the ISOC/LLC budget process seems to suggest to me
   that ISOC understands that these revenues are expected to decline to
   become insignificant.


(To be clear: "profitable" --> funds generated by in-person meetings that are
spent on secretariat and other non-meeting related expenses such as
RFC-editor, IANA, etc.  As a whole, the IETF does not make any money)

    > (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?)

Internet-Draft?
Design-Team meetings/mailing lists?

    > 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 think that ISOC has tried to run conferences like this; I think that most
IT operations people do not attend many conferences for the simple reason
that they have no time.
It's not about cost of the meeting, it's about the time away.
So to get their attention, it has to be near them, but if it's near them,
then they can not focus much.  I suspect that well done youtube videos
chopped into 20 minute segments might be best.

--
Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-