IAOC Chair report for IETF 97 -- narrative notes

["Leslie Daigle" <[e-mail]>]

This is not a fully-fledged written report from the IAOC, but I wanted 
to capture some written notes about the material that I will be 
presenting in the IAOC Chair report in plenary at IETF 97.


TL;DR: 2016 has been a successful year, if more expensive year than 
we’d budgeted. This is not the end of the world, and as we look to 
2017 we’d like your help in broadening our sponsorship base.


A key focus for the IAOC is, necessarily, the IETF’s financial 
reality. Since the IETF 96 meeting in Berlin, we have an update on how 
the IETF is doing against its 2016 budget, and we have put together the 
2017 budget.

First, a few hints about the nature of the IETF annual budget. Many of 
our larger costs are regular operational ones and they are well 
understood, negotiated, and largely fixed as we head into any year. The 
big unknowns are always the meetings. Every region and each venue have 
their own particularities (e.g., in Europe we have to pay for meeting 
room space, in the US we do not), and then there is the question of how 
many people will attend. Having a drop or increase of 100 meeting 
attendees makes a difference of ~$75,000 in meeting fees. All of these 
aspects are reviewed when we plan meetings (3 years out) and set up a 
budget and projections for the coming years, and the budget has to be 
based on estimates.

2016:
As has been discussed in past plenaries, the IETF made choices to cover 
more of the globe in 2016, including our first ever meeting in Latin 
America. IETF 95 in Buenos Aires was successful on a number of fronts, 
including more engagement of Latin American engineers. Clearly, some of 
our projections for IETF 95 were off (it is always hard to make 
predictions for new regions), but not at a level that was surprising or 
insurmountable. Berlin is a perennial favourite, and IETF 96 was no 
exception. However, we had not been to Seoul in over a decade.

As always, the full financial statements for the IETF are available at 
https://iaoc.ietf.org/financial-statements.html once the books have been 
closed for the month.

Very briefly, the summary of our situation after IETF 95 & 96 is that 
the IETF has a revenue shortfall for the year to date of $501k, but 
expenses are also down $332k — to the end of September 2016 that puts 
us $169,000 over budget.

And, here’s what we currently project for the rest of 2016, as we are 
in the midst of our final meeting of the year: sponsorship is a little 
lower than budgeted, and expenses a little higher; we have fewer than 
1,000 paid attendees here (we had budgeted 1,120). The attendance 
numbers are not helped by industry shifts.

As it stands, we expect that we will run $369,000 over budget for 2016. 
Is the sky falling? No, because the Internet Society is supporting us, 
and that number translates to an increase in the amount of support that 
they are giving us in 2016. Thank you, ISOC!

2017:
We would like to have better alignment with our budget projections in 
2017, and key to that will be fulfilling our sponsorship objectives. You 
may not be the right person to get your organization to consider 
sponsoring some part of an IETF meeting, but you may know the person who 
is in the right position. Working with the ISOC team that develops and 
delivers our sponsorship activities, we have tuned the packages 
available for 2017 to (hopefully) better line up with what potential 
sponsors have been asking for. We encourage you to have a look at the 
details and help find the right people for discussing sponsorship — 
opportunities available in large and small sizes! Details are available 
here:

https://iaoc.ietf.org/host-and-sponsorship.html

Note that this updated plan is spread throughout all the meetings. In 
particular, the targets are higher for IETF 100. That’s a reflection 
of an expectation of the meeting number being popular, and not because 
we are planning for extra expenses at that meeting.

The IETF budgets are posted at 
https://iaoc.ietf.org/budget-and-finance.html . Note that does not yet 
show the 2017 budget, as it was a work in progress until final approval 
at the Internet Society board meeting last week. The page will be 
updated shortly.

Leslie.

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Leslie Daigle
Principal, ThinkingCat Enterprises LLC
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