Re: Planned changes to registration payments & deadlines

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Monday, April 23, 2018 20:15 -0400 Michael Richardson
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> I haven't worked in an organization big enough to need travel
> approvals in 20 years. If it takes 5 weeks to get approval to
> go, it seems that someone should simply say to their manager:
>        "If you can approve this by Feb 1, it's gonna be $700.
>         If you can't approve it that fast, then it's gonna be
> $175 more. 	Or, I can register and pay now, and take a $70
> risk that you 	won't approve me going."

Based on dealing with similar issues in a different setting, for
working meetings like the IETF (rather than "conferences" or
various [other] professional development activities, some
companies have fairly firm "don't bother asking for approval for
meeting N+1 before you have submitted a travel report and
documentation on meeting N".  For those organizations (and I
have absolutely no idea how many IETF participants have to
interact with them), consider that

	* The cutoff for submitting minutes is typically three
	weeks from the last day of the relevant meeting
	* The cutoff for corrections to the minutes, i.e., the
	date on which minutes can be assumed to be final, is a
	bit over another three weeks, i.e., six weeks out.

If one ends up on a position in which a travel request cannot be
submitted after that and one assumes a four month cycle, that
implies that the request can't go in until around nine or ten
weeks before the next meeting. Is that too close if the "early"
cutoff is 7 weeks before?  Maybe not... depends on the
organization.

Or try the other end.  For IETF-type meetings, it is not unusual
for a travel-approver to want to see at least a preliminary
agenda along with the travel request.  On our current schedule,
the preliminary agenda shows up about four weeks before the
meeting and the nominally final one shows up a week later, but
before the "early" registration cutoff.   If that boundary is
moved back, than no one who needs an agenda to make a decision,
or to persuade someone else to make a positive decision, then it
is all over for "early" and the window before "standard" is not
available is rather short.

Maybe that is still ok, but I think we should be sure we
understand what we are doing and, as Brian suggests, avoid
making decisions on the basis of false comparisons to, e.g.,
annual conference-type events.

    john