Re: [Ietf108planning] Registration open for IETF 108

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 11 Jun 2020, at 11:37, tom petch wrote:

> Looking at RFC8711 I see
>
> "7.5. IETF Meeting Revenues
> Meeting revenues are another important source of funding that
> supports the IETF, coming mainly from the fees paid by IETF meeting
> participants. The IETF Executive Director sets those meeting fees,
> in consultation with other IETF LLC staff and the IETF community,
> with approval by the IETF LLC Board. Setting these fees and
> projecting the number of participants at future meetings is a key
> part of the annual budget process."
>
> Elsewhere in that cluster of RFC that came out in February, in the 
> context of venue, it explicitly calls out the need for consensus as 
> declared by the IETF Chair.  Here there is no call for consensus.  If 
> the IETF had wanted more control then it should not have approved 
> RFC8711:-)  I think that Jay was well within his rights to take the 
> actions he did.

Tom, it was made pretty clear in the discussion of RFC 8788 that when 
the IETF referred to "meetings", it did not have in mind the idea of an 
entirely remote meeting. Similarly, in the same cluster as 8711, neither 
8718 nor 8719 anticipates the idea that a meeting would be held with no 
"location" or "venue" at all. So to say of 8711 that 7.5 clearly 
anticipates entirely online meetings is a bit of a stretch. It doesn't 
absolutely conclude otherwise, but the discussion of 8788 should have 
been a pretty good hint that the community would have been surprised by 
the interpretation, and the better course would have been to ask the 
community what it intended by the text in 7.5 of 8711.

Also, I know of several people, and I'm sure others know of similarly 
situated folks, who are regular participants but are from 
time-to-to-time between jobs or in other financial situations, who have 
specifically decided not to attend the physical meeting and instead 
participate remotely because of the lack of registration fee (in 
addition to not having to pay for travel). Folks have come to expect 
that participation in the face-to-face meeting would incur expenses, but 
participating remotely, whether by listening to the audio feed and using 
jabber or email to send in comments, or more recently by Meetecho, was 
going to be free. While not the only reasonable interpretation of our 
history and BCPs on the matter, having remote participation be free is 
certainly not an unreasonable interpretation of the status quo.

So "well within his rights" seems a bit of a reach. Perhaps "not 
completely unjustified in assuming" is closer.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best