Re: charging remote participants
Hi Bernard, I'm afraid that, as it usually happens with 'software', we are overly underestimating the huge development effort (in terms of human resources and brain cycles) that is needed before arriving at a 'few hundred $ per year' product. When it comes to the IETF, let me also add that, in my honest opinion, no existing product can simply be taken from the market and brought to our community. There's a significant effort associated with the integration with a whole bunch of tools (meeting materials page, agenda, etc.) which are already available. Not to mention the deep knowledge of all IETF procedures and mechanisms required in order to organize and conduct a successful meeting. If you take all these things into account, you'll probably arrive at a much higher funding level than the one you envisage. I also believe that the time is probably ripe to stop the experiment-only phase and start to take seriously into account the fact that remote participation is in all respects a 'servic! e' that the IETF is going to offer to the community. Experiments have a well-defined time-frame; after such a period, they have to be declared either a success or a failure. Just my 2 cents, Simon Bernard Aboba bernard_ab...@hotmail.com ha scritto: Hadriel said: I agree. My proposal for how/what/where to get more revenue (and not from remote participants) was only in case we actually need it to pay for enhancing remote participation. It's not clear we have such a need any time soon, but I was only trying to provide an alternative model to charging remote participants. [BA] It appears quite possible to significantly enhance remote participation in the IETF with minimal funding. The load pattern of the IETF (heavy during physical meetings, much lower in between), accommodates itself well to the use of cloud services. - making it possible for the IETF to avoid having to purchase hardware to handle the peak load, instead being able to scale up/down capacity as needed. From what I can tell, the breadth and depth of services obtainable for a few thousand $/year of expenditure is pretty impressive. As an example, the cost of putting up an audio conferencing service supporting Opus (usable by any WG that needed it for virtual or design team meetings) would only be a few hundred $/year, excluding the cost of PSTN connectivity. Even small scale video conferencing doesn't appear to be very expensive. If there are only a few video participants, it is possible to mix on the peer, and for centralized conferencing, a small instance virtual machine (e.g. one core, 1 GB RAM) appears capable of handling half a dozen participants using software such as jitsi-videobridge, without breaking a sweat. So, a thousand $/year might cover it (assuming that we aren't attempting to provide telepresence-quality video). Even if money were *really* tight, we could easily obtain donations to cover costs in that ballpark. IMHO, the hard problems relate to engineering, not finance. In particular, the challenge is to provide a system with low administrative overhead and good ease-of-use, integrated with IETF processes. To advance the state of the art, IAOC RPS committee (see http://iaoc.ietf.org/committees.html#rps) will continue to sponsor ongoing experiments at meetings, as well as pilot tests.
Re: charging remote participants
Hadriel said: I agree. My proposal for how/what/where to get more revenue (and not from remote participants) was only in case we actually need it to pay for enhancing remote participation. It's not clear we have such a need any time soon, but I was only trying to provide an alternative model to charging remote participants. [BA] It appears quite possible to significantly enhance remote participation in the IETF with minimal funding. The load pattern of the IETF (heavy during physical meetings, much lower in between), accommodates itself well to the use of cloud services. - making it possible for the IETF to avoid having to purchase hardware to handle the peak load, instead being able to scale up/down capacity as needed. From what I can tell, the breadth and depth of services obtainable for a few thousand $/year of expenditure is pretty impressive. As an example, the cost of putting up an audio conferencing service supporting Opus (usable by any WG that needed it for virtual or design team meetings) would only be a few hundred $/year, excluding the cost of PSTN connectivity. Even small scale video conferencing doesn't appear to be very expensive. If there are only a few video participants, it is possible to mix on the peer, and for centralized conferencing, a small instance virtual machine (e.g. one core, 1 GB RAM) appears capable of handling half a dozen participants using software such as jitsi-videobridge, without breaking a sweat. So, a thousand $/year might cover it (assuming that we aren't attempting to provide telepresence-quality video). Even if money were *really* tight, we could easily obtain donations to cover costs in that ballpark. IMHO, the hard problems relate to engineering, not finance. In particular, the challenge is to provide a system with low administrative overhead and good ease-of-use, integrated with IETF processes. To advance the state of the art, IAOC RPS committee (see http://iaoc.ietf.org/committees.html#rps) will continue to sponsor ongoing experiments at meetings, as well as pilot tests.
Re: Charging remote participants
From: Abdussalam Baryun abdussalambar...@gmail.com Date: 08/25/2013 08:40 AM ... The reward/motivation from IETF to participants is to acknowledge in writting their efforts, which I think still the IETF management still does not motivate/encourage. I COMPLETELY disagree with this. The reward/motivation for participation (remotely or in person) is to have your comments, ideas, suggestions,... TAKEN SERIOUSLY, even if the eventual decision goes against you. Of course, that presupposes that your comments are sensible, and show that you understand the context. It is the specific authors, and not the IETF that determines who gets mentioned in the Acknowledgements section. In the working groups I am involved with, I have found the authors to be very generous with acknowledgements. Sometimes I have been acknowledged when my comments were primarily editorial and clarification, without actually adding any new ideas. Of course, there have been one or two times that I have thought I made a contribution, but didn't get mentioned. That is the author's choice. As my mother used to say What you lose on the roundabouts you gain on the swings IETF Remote Participants (IETFRP) SHOULD charge the IETF not the other way, because still the IETF ignores some IETFRP efforts (or even hides information that should be provided to the diverse community). I have never felt ignored as a remote participant. Sometimes misunderstood because there is little opportunity to expand and explain when you are remote. But never ignored. I have no idea what you mean by hides information. Are you suggesting that someone is censoring mailing list posts? Janet
Re: Charging remote participants
On Mon, 26 Aug 2013, Janet P Gunn wrote: I have never felt ignored as a remote participant. Sometimes misunderstood because there is little opportunity to expand and explain when you are remote. But never ignored. I have no idea what you mean by hides information. Are you suggesting that someone is censoring mailing list posts? It's my experience that different WG mailing lists handle remote participation very differently. I have put it down to a difference in common working method of the people participating in different WGs. Some WGs tend to accumulate people who are very used to remote participation and discussion, others seem to accumulate people who have a different history so they tend to handle posts very differently. Perhaps that's why the view on how well this works is so different between different people? -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: swm...@swm.pp.se
Re: Charging remote participants
On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Janet P Gunn jgu...@csc.com wrote: From: Abdussalam Baryun abdussalambar...@gmail.com Date: 08/25/2013 08:40 AM ... The reward/motivation from IETF to participants is to acknowledge in writting their efforts, which I think still the IETF management still does not motivate/encourage. I COMPLETELY disagree with this. The reward/motivation for participation (remotely or in person) is to have your comments, ideas, suggestions,... TAKEN SERIOUSLY, even if the eventual decision goes against you. Amen. It also fits very well with the standard engineer mentality, especially those tired of banging heads against managerial brick walls at day-jobs. I've also participated in assorted WGs because I wanted to *learn* what an upcoming standard was (probably) going to look like. Sometimes I didn't have ideas to contribute, sometimes I didn't even fully grok the context... but I still consider myself (to have been) a remote participant, at least for keeping up on it and being willing (if not always able) to offer ideas. As for being acked in writing, I'll grant Abdussalam that it's nice. It was a fun little ego-boost (and resume-boost!) when I was credited in a draft, and especially when that became an RFC. However, that's not at all why I did it. It was more like I've been tasked to implement something using this standard, let's see what it says, oh the IETF is debating the next version, let's see what they're saying... and when I couldn't help opening my fat trap, they liked what I said. Who'da thunk it? :*) As my mother used to say What you lose on the roundabouts you gain on the swings I had to go Google that. To save others the trouble: it seems to refer to rides at a carnival, and mean whatever losses you suffer in one place, you usually make up elsewhere, implying that it all balances out in the end. -Dave -- Dave Aronson, the T. Rex of Codosaurus LLC, secret-cleared freelance software developer taking contracts in or near NoVa or remote. See information at http://www.Codosaur.us/.
Re: Charging remote participants
Hi - From: Dave Aronson ietf2d...@davearonson.com To: IETF Discussion Mailing List ietf@ietf.org; Janet P Gunn jgu...@csc.com Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 9:54 AM Subject: Re: Charging remote participants ... I had to go Google that. To save others the trouble: it seems to refer to rides at a carnival, and mean whatever losses you suffer in one place, you usually make up elsewhere, implying that it all balances out in the end. I had to google it as well. The word roundabout (in the sense of traffic circle) led me to mistakenly think it had something to do with navigating British streets, but this seems to be where the idiom comes from: http://www.oldpoetry.com/Patrick_R_Chalmers/Roundabouts_and_Swings Randy
Re: Charging remote participants
As my mother used to say What you lose on the roundabouts you gain on the swings I had to go Google that. To save others the trouble: it seems to refer to rides at a carnival, and mean whatever losses you suffer in one place, you usually make up elsewhere, implying that it all balances out in the end. Oh dear, I didn't realize it was that obscure. Yes, you win some, you lose some, but in the end it balances out Or sometimes you are the dog, and sometimes you are the fire hydrant It refers to carnivals or fairs. Roundabouts are merry-go-rounds. Swings are aka swingboats. and do a full 360 degree rotation. Wikipedia calls them Pirate Ship (Ride) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_ship_(ride) Janet
Re: Charging remote participants
From: Randy Presuhn randy_pres...@mindspring.com I had to google it as well. The word roundabout (in the sense of traffic circle) led me to mistakenly think it had something to do with navigating British streets, but this seems to be where the idiom comes from: http://www.oldpoetry.com/Patrick_R_Chalmers/Roundabouts_and_Swings Randy I am pretty sure that the usage of roundabout to refer to a traffic circle is derived from its usage as a carnival ride, which in the US would be called a merry-go-round. Janet
Re: Charging remote participants
Now I get it!! A Spanglish translation would be It depends how the rides in the carnival goes for you (Depende como te va en la feria) /as sorry for the offtopic On 8/26/13 1:54 PM, Dave Aronson wrote: As my mother used to say What you lose on the roundabouts you gain on the swings I had to go Google that. To save others the trouble: it seems to refer to rides at a carnival, and mean whatever losses you suffer in one place, you usually make up elsewhere, implying that it all balances out in the end.
Re: Charging remote participants
Hi Hadriel, I agree that charging IETF participants with any money is not a good idea, but charging participants with some effort/work/contribution to do is needed. For example, participants SHOULD do some work in IETF, either review, authoring, attending-meetings, commenting on lists, etc. Otherwise the IETF will not develop. If someone just subscribe to the list with no contribution, that I will not call a participant. The reward/motivation from IETF to participants is to acknowledge in writting their efforts, which I think still the IETF management still does not motivate/encourage. IETF Remote Participants (IETFRP) SHOULD charge the IETF not the other way, because still the IETF ignores some IETFRP efforts (or even hides information that should be provided to the diverse community). AB On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Hadriel Kaplan hadriel.kap...@oracle.comwrote: Since the topic keeps getting raised... I think that charging remote participants any fee is a really terrible idea. One of the really great things about the IETF is its open and free (as in beer) participation policy. The real work is supposed to be done on mailing lists, and there's no charge or restriction on who can send emails. That policy is actually quite rare for standards bodies, and makes our output better not worse. Obviously we discuss things and do real work at physical meetings too, and they're not simply social occasions. At the end of the day we actually want people to come to the physical meetings, but the realities of life make that impossible for many. But charging remote participants for better tools/experience isn't the answer. At least for me, whenever I'm discussing a draft mechanism I actually *want* input from remote participants. I don't want it to be only from folks who can afford to provide input. I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. At one time we worried that free remote participation would lead to too many random participants to get work done, but that hasn't become a problem afaict. Please don't whittle it down further to only those who can afford it. I would do anything whatsoever to avoid charging remote participants, even if it means raising the fee for f2f attendees to subsidize remote-participant tooling costs. In that vein, I think a lot of the f2f attendees get our reg-fee paid by our employer and another $50 or even $100 isn't going to make a bit of difference for us - for those whom it would make a difference, I'd create another category of f2f registration fee like 'Self-paying Attendee' or some such. Selecting the new category would drop your fee by the $50 or $100, but wouldn't change what gets displayed on your badge or anything. It would be purely optional, with no guilt attached for not paying it and no visible difference to anyone else. Just put some words on the registration form page saying something like If you cannot expense your registration fee, please select the 'Self-paying Attendee' category or something like that. Or make it some checkbox thingy. I believe the majority of folks who can expense it will not have difficulty expensing a 'Regular Attendee' charge so long as it doesn't say we opted to pay more. -hadriel p.s. Even from a purely practical standpoint, charging remote participants raises a lot of issues - we debate incessantly just about the f2f day-pass, and that's nothing compared to this. For example: if things break during the meeting session, do we re-imburse them? Do we pro-rate the re-imbursement based on how many of their meetings had technical issues with audio or video? Do we charge a flat fee for the whole week of meetings, or just charge per meeting session, or depending on how long the session is? Do we charge students a different rate, like we do f2f reg-fees? Do we need to provide tech support with a specific SLA? This while thing is a can of worms. It's not worth it.
Re: Charging remote participants
On Aug 25, 2013, at 8:39 AM, Abdussalam Baryun abdussalambar...@gmail.com wrote: I agree that charging IETF participants with any money is not a good idea, but charging participants with some effort/work/contribution to do is needed. For example, participants SHOULD do some work in IETF, either review, authoring, attending-meetings, commenting on lists, etc. Otherwise the IETF will not develop. If someone just subscribe to the list with no contribution, that I will not call a participant. When I and others have been using the word participants, we've been talking about the ones who do actively contribute - by reviewing the drafts and providing their input in email or at the mic or in jabber, or by submitting their own drafts, or providing text, etc. Of course there are plenty of folks who merely monitor, and that's fine too, but yeah it's not useful for improving our drafts. But those aren't the remote participants I was talking about. The reward/motivation from IETF to participants is to acknowledge in writting their efforts, which I think still the IETF management still does not motivate/encourage. For the WG's I've been involved in, the WG drafts often do acknowledge major contributors in the Acknowledgements section. But yeah it's not always done, or people are sometimes left out. Having authored a few myself, I find it's actually quite hard to keep track of contributors. And I always feel bad if I forget someone. :( If we really feel that's a problem there are some simple solutions to it - the same problem occurs for open source software and they have simple solutions for it. But I'm not sure it really is a problem worth fixing. My belief is the motivation to participate should be: for the benefit of everyone; and for the benefit of the contributor in using or implementing it, by making the mechanism/protocol work better for them and their needs. Putting names in the RFC doesn't feel to me like a thing we should use for the purpose of motivation, but rather just to acknowledge those who went above-and-beyond and were major contributors. No? IETF Remote Participants (IETFRP) SHOULD charge the IETF not the other way, because still the IETF ignores some IETFRP efforts (or even hides information that should be provided to the diverse community). I have never seen the IETF hide information that should be provided to the diverse community. That's a pretty serious charge, and you'll have to provide some examples to back it up, because I don't believe it. The only way to do that would be to prevent postings on our mailing lists. I know we have blocked/removed some mailing list subscribers in the past, but those were very rare occasions and debated quite a bit before-hand in an open manner (see RFC 3683). For some obvious cases we don't need to discuss it before-hand (see RFC 3005). The IETF is not lacking for paranoia regarding such things... so I don't think we're in danger of doing what you fear. -hadriel
Re: Charging remote participants
On 08/17/2013 02:43 AM, Henning Schulzrinne wrote: Thus, I think this is worth exploring, as an experiment, just like we started the day-pass experiment a number of years ago. I don't know what this refers to in the above sentence, but I agree with everything else in your note. Offer a self-pay rate, as suggested by Hadriel. See how many people take it and ask them whether that made a difference in their attendance. Just my 0.00 € I don't agree with charging remote attendees until after it works for them and after successful remote participation becomes somewhat disruptive to the f2f participants. We have so far to go before we get there, that discussion of how, what, who or why to charge is mostly silly distraction. I also believe its valuable that we can truthfully say that anyone can participate with just an email address and IMO we should not damage that. (And yes, I recognise that you can participate much more fully if you go to f2f or virtual voice meetings.) So IMO discussion of details of charging remote participants is also slightly damaging. S.
Re: Charging remote participants
On Aug 17, 2013, at 7:05 AM, Stephen Farrell stephen.farr...@cs.tcd.ie wrote: I don't agree with charging remote attendees until after it works for them and after successful remote participation becomes somewhat disruptive to the f2f participants. We have so far to go before we get there, that discussion of how, what, who or why to charge is mostly silly distraction. I agree. My proposal for how/what/where to get more revenue (and not from remote participants) was only in case we actually need it to pay for enhancing remote participation. It's not clear we have such a need any time soon, but I was only trying to provide an alternative model to charging remote participants. -hadriel
Re: Charging remote participants
08/16/2013 09:10:54 AM: From: Hadriel Kaplan hadriel.kap...@oracle.com ...I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. I agree. The realities of internal politics/funding being what they are, it is sometimes going to be just as hard to get $100 remote fee approved as it as to get the whole f2f trip approved. Janet
Re: Charging remote participants
On 08/16/2013 09:38 AM, Janet P Gunn wrote: ...I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. I agree. The realities of internal politics/funding being what they are, it is sometimes going to be just as hard to get $100 remote fee approved as it as to get the whole f2f trip approved. As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. Keith
Re: Charging remote participants
Keith, Fortunately sympathy is unidirectional, therefore I keep all my respect towards you while totally disagree with your opinion... On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 4:56 PM, Keith Moore mo...@network-heretics.comwrote: On 08/16/2013 09:38 AM, Janet P Gunn wrote: ...I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. I agree. The realities of internal politics/funding being what they are, it is sometimes going to be just as hard to get $100 remote fee approved as it as to get the whole f2f trip approved. As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. Keith
Re: Charging remote participants
In some parts of the world there are good engineers that get $100 for a week as salary. Charging remote participation will raise the bar even more for people that cannot travel and their only way to participate is in mailing lists and remotely. Providing good remote tools it expensive in capex and opex as stated before, but charging remote participants it is not the way forward, unless that payment were optional (I personally I would do it, but I know people -students, researchers in public universities, badly paid engineers whose employer is not convinced that the ietf is a good way to expend money, etc.- ) Regards, as On 8/16/13 11:56 AM, Keith Moore wrote: On 08/16/2013 09:38 AM, Janet P Gunn wrote: ...I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. I agree. The realities of internal politics/funding being what they are, it is sometimes going to be just as hard to get $100 remote fee approved as it as to get the whole f2f trip approved. As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. Keith
Re: Charging remote participants
On Aug 16, 2013, at 10:56 AM, Keith Moore mo...@network-heretics.com wrote: As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. This isn't about fairness or equal-pain-for-all. It's about getting work done and producing good output. Whether someone remote has to pay $0 or $1000 won't change your $3.5k out-of-pocket expense. If you don't feel the $3.5k was worth it for you to go physically, don't go. But let's say we go deploy some more tools for remote participants, and want to subsidize that additional cost. Because making f2f folks pay out-of-pocket to subsidize remote participants reduces the incentive for them to come physically, I suggested we have a 'Self-paying Rate' category or check-box in the registration form page that removes any new additional remote-participant subsidy from the reg-fee cost. Those of us who can expense the reg-fee won't select that, and can expense the new full amount.[1] Nothing on the badges or attendee list or whatever would show any difference... it's purely a registration form/receipt thing. [Fwiw, I think people still get their money's worth to go, though $3.5k is pushing it. I assume it was that high for you because you're in the US and it was quite expensive to fly there - I find US-based f2f meetings are far cheaper for US folks, but I assume they're more expensive for non-US folks so in that sense it's good we rotate meeting locations.] -hadriel [1] Sure some people may claim Self-Paying status even when expensing their fee, but that's ok so long as many people pay the full amount. Speaking just for myself, every employer I've worked at so far would have paid the full amount - it just can't be an opt-in to pay more, nor look like we're 'donating' or stuff like that. It's got to be a 'Regular Rate' or some such for our receipts, while the other type says 'Self-Paying Rate' or some such on their receipts. And it can't be like $1000 more, but $100 is reasonable.
Re: Charging remote participants
On 8/16/2013 6:10 AM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote: Since the topic keeps getting raised... I think that charging remote participants any fee is a really terrible idea. One of the really great things about the IETF is its open and free (as in beer) participation policy. The real work is supposed to be done on mailing lists, and there's no charge or restriction on who can send emails. That policy is actually quite rare for standards bodies, and makes our output better not worse. The IETF has never been free. Actually, it's quite expensive. We've maintained the myth that it's free because we've had long-term funding support from the outside, originally dubbed daddy pays. First it was ARPA, then CNRI and now ISOC (and wealthy corporations). Having a wealthy benefactor is definitely pleasant, but it is also fragile. It does not take much for funding or political problems to develop. Currently, primary IETF funding comes from 3 sources: 1. ISOC 2. Face-to-face meeting attendees 3. Face-to-face sponsors Each of these represents a sizable pool, although the sponsors require significant, on-going effort to recruit (the formal term is cost of sales). ISOC is the main 'daddy' in the equation because it graciously and reliably gives the IETF whatever money is asked for. There's a large annual budget that gets approved, but ISOC readily adds to that when asked. And one certainly cannot fault ISOC for this, of course. Nevermind that supporting the IETF is one of ISOC's main reasons for existence; it's still darn nice of them, and darn lucky that they have such a reliable and large base of their own funding. Sponsors and the bulk of meeting attendee fees constitute another daddy, in this case an aggregate corporate daddy. Wealthy organizations. But the resulting financial model for the IETF isn't very business-like. We regularly make expenditure choices on a well-intentioned whim. We do it because, contrary to the real world, we don't suffer meaningful financial downsides for poor choices. Daddy will keep paying. Robust organizations make sure they have diverse revenue sources. In the case of the IETF, we need to balance between easy, inclusive access by the widest possible range of possible participants, versus diverse funding to ensure both financial and political robustness. But charging remote participants for better tools/experience isn't the answer. At least for me, whenever I'm discussing a draft mechanism I actually *want* input from remote participants. I don't want it to be only from folks who can afford to provide input. I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. At one time we worried that free remote participation would lead to too many random participants to get work done, but that hasn't become a problem afaict. Please don't whittle it down further to only those who can afford it. The diversity of participation /is/ a problem and always has been. However it also is a benefit, and always has been. So, yes, we want to continue to make highly diverse participation easy. But we still have bills to pay. So it's not reasonable to argue against one source of revenue in the absence of a compensating argument in favor of another. As remote participation tools get better, it is likely that we will have more remote attendees and fewer face-to-face ones. This likely means significant reduction in attendee fees but also could challenge sponsor fees, since the marketing benefit of sponsorship for the f2f will likely go down. The IETF already has a modest program for free or subsidized participation in the face-to-face meeting. Attention to the diverse access you cite would recommend extending it to remote participation, should fees be imposed. I would do anything whatsoever to avoid charging remote participants, even if it means raising the fee for f2f attendees to subsidize remote-participant tooling costs. So, you want to make the f2f meetings even more exclusionary than they already are? The meetings are already dominated by well-funded corporate attendees. Higher fees will screen out some additional percentage of the others who currently find a way to pay for attendance. In that vein, I think a lot of the f2f attendees get our reg-fee paid by our employer and another $50 or even $100 isn't going to make a bit of difference for us For you. For other well-funded corporate attendees. But each increment makes a difference for anyone on a tight budget. So yes: - for those whom it would make a difference, I'd create another category of f2f registration fee like 'Self-paying Attendee' or some such. Selecting the new category would drop your fee by the $50 or $100, but wouldn't change what gets displayed on your badge or anything. It would be purely
Re: Charging remote participants
Hello, On 8/16/13 11:56 AM, Keith Moore wrote: As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. Funny reading that under the light of the IETF worried about increasing participation and diversity. There are places in the world where $100 is all the disposable income an engineer *might* have. For months. And, before the IETF would commit to take steps in that direction, it would be interesting to see some numbers about how much money needs to be invested in deploying and operating remote participation tools that would actually make people feel they are getting value back for a $100 remote attendance fee. I can already imagine the complain threads in the [XXattendees-remote] list. Oh, the humanity! ~Carlos
Re: Charging remote participants
On Fri, 16 Aug 2013, Keith Moore wrote: On 08/16/2013 09:38 AM, Janet P Gunn wrote: ...I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. I agree. The realities of internal politics/funding being what they are, it is sometimes going to be just as hard to get $100 remote fee approved as it as to get the whole f2f trip approved. As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. As someone who couldn't justify the $3k+ to attend the meeting, and for whom attending a meeting implies substantial lost revenue opportunities, the $100 (or more) fee for first class remote participation would be awesome.
Re: Charging remote participants
I expect _I_ would pay $100 out of my own pocket, if it came to that. But not all remote participants would be able to. Janet ietf-boun...@ietf.org wrote on 08/16/2013 10:56:27 AM: From: Keith Moore mo...@network-heretics.com On 08/16/2013 09:38 AM, Janet P Gunn wrote: ...I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. I agree. The realities of internal politics/funding being what they are, it is sometimes going to be just as hard to get $100 remote fee approved as it as to get the whole f2f trip approved. As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. Keith
Re: Charging remote participants
--On Friday, August 16, 2013 13:07 -0300 Carlos M. Martinez carlosm3...@gmail.com wrote: ... And, before the IETF would commit to take steps in that direction, it would be interesting to see some numbers about how much money needs to be invested in deploying and operating remote participation tools that would actually make people feel they are getting value back for a $100 remote attendance fee. Please Dave Crocker's note before my comment below -- I agree with mose of it don't want to repeat what he has already said well. As someone who favors charging remote participants, who has paid most or all of the travel and associated costs for every meeting I've attended in the last ten plus years, and who doesn't share in a view of if I can, everyone can, let me make a few observations. (1) As Dave points out, this activity has never been free. The question is only about who pays. If any participants have to pay (or convince their companies to pay) and others, as a matter of categories, do not, that ultimately weakens the process even if, most of the time, those who pay don't expect or get favored treatment. Having some participants get a free ride that really comes at the expense of other participants (and potentially competing organizations) is just not a healthy idea. (2) Trying to figure out exactly what remote participation (equipment, staffing, etc.) will cost the IETF and then trying to assess those costs to the remote participants would be madness for multiple reasons. Not least of those is the fact that, if new equipment or procedures are needed, there will be significant startup costs with the base of remote participants arriving only later. One could try to offset that effect with some accounting assumptions that would be either rather complex, rather naive, or both, but, as a community, we aren't good at those sorts of calculations nor at accepting them when the IAOC does them in a way that doesn't feel transparent. (3) Trying to establish a more or less elaborate system of categories of participants with category-specific fees or to scale the current system of subsidies and waivers to accommodate the full range of potential in-person and remote participants is almost equally insane. While we might make such arrangements work and keeping categories and status off badges helps, it gets us entangled with requiring that the Secretariat and/or IAD and/or some IAOC or other leadership members be privy to information that is at least private and that might be formally confidential. We don't want to go there if we can help it. (4) The current registration fee covers both some proportion of meeting-specific expenses and some proportion of overhead expenses that are not specific to the meetings or to meeting attendance. Breaking those proportions down specifically also would require some accounting magic, especially given the differences between meetings with greater or lesser degrees of sponsorship. But I believe that, if we can trust the IAOC to set meeting registration fees for in-person attendees, we can trust them to set target (see below) meeting registration fees for remote participants. Note that such a fee involves some reasonable contribution to overhead expenses (including remote participation costs, secretariat site visits, and the like) just as the fee for in-person participants does -- it is not based on the costs of facilities for remote participation. So, to suggest this again in a different context: Remote participants then pay between 0 and 100% of that target fee, based on their consciences, resources, and whatever other considerations apply. No one asks how given remote participants or their organizations arrive at the numbers they pick. No one is asked to put themselves into a category or explain their personal finances. The IETF does not need to offer promises about the confidentiality of information that it doesn't collect. Any Euro we collect is one Euro more than we are collecting now and, if a Euro or two is what a participant from a developing area feels is equitable for him or her to pay, then that is fine. That voluntary fee model would be a terrible one except that I think we can actually trust the vast majority of the community to be reasonable. Certainly some people will not be, but they would probably figure out how to game a category system or any more complex system we came up with. Just as the price of running a truly open standards process including tolerating a certain number of non-constructive participants (and other subspecies of trolls), it may require tolerating a certain number of people who won't want to pay their fair share (or whose judgments of fair might be at variance with what other people with the same information would conclude). Absent clear indications that more complex process, or one that relied more on leadership judgments about individual requests, would produce more than enough additional revenue to compensate
Re: Charging remote participants
On Aug 16, 2013, at 11:55 AM, Dave Crocker d...@dcrocker.net wrote: On 8/16/2013 6:10 AM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote: Since the topic keeps getting raised... I think that charging remote participants any fee is a really terrible idea. One of the really great things about the IETF is its open and free (as in beer) participation policy. The real work is supposed to be done on mailing lists, and there's no charge or restriction on who can send emails. That policy is actually quite rare for standards bodies, and makes our output better not worse. The IETF has never been free. Actually, it's quite expensive. We've maintained the myth that it's free because we've had long-term funding support from the outside, originally dubbed daddy pays. First it was ARPA, then CNRI and now ISOC (and wealthy corporations). I didn't say it didn't cost someone money to run it - I said it's free to participate, and I like that policy and think we're better for it. *Of course* someone has to pay something, and we could have a long debate about a better funding model for the IETF in general. But that's not a problem I'm trying to fix. Some people on the list have expressed a desire to have better remote participation. I don't know if that's necessary or not, but I suggested a possible solution for that (i.e., audio input). The solution will cost some money. Not a lot, hopefully, but more than currently being spent. The people who run the meetings will have to tell us how much more, per meeting. Assuming it costs more than some trivial amount, we have to figure out a source of revenue for that. We don't have to re-do the whole IETF funding model - just figure out where to get the money for this new thing. So if that costs real money, I propose that instead of charging remote participants the cost, we charge f2f participants by burying it in the reg-fee, but discounting the reg-fee for those who can't expense the reg-fee. That sounds whacky, I know. It sounds radical too. It's not a new idea though, and some other places do the same but using different words (like Corporate Attendee vs. Individual Attendee, but those don't make sense here). The good thing is it's something we can test and measure, without impacting attendee rates. We can't measure how impactful a fee to remote participants is - the number who join rises and falls due to various reasons; and even if they don't join due to the fee we won't know it - they won't say so, and won't join remotely, and we won't know it. Thus it's self-limiting and self-fulfilling. We can't measure how impactful a mandatory increase across-the-board for f2f meeting reg-fee is either - the number of f2f attendees rises/falls based on too many factors, and again it's self-limiting and self-fulfilling. With a selectable registration form check-box, and no laying of guilt or stigma on those who do/don't choose 'Self-Paying Rate' vs. 'Full Rate' and no external indicator of it, we can figure out if we get more money and how much, without directly impacting our f2f attendance rate. We can even do it *before* we go and pay for anything. We could, for example, have the check-box for the Vancouver IETF meeting form, with textual explanation of why to check it. We could do the same for remote participants too, just to see how much we'd get that way instead. As remote participation tools get better, it is likely that we will have more remote attendees and fewer face-to-face ones. This likely means significant reduction in attendee fees but also could challenge sponsor fees, since the marketing benefit of sponsorship for the f2f will likely go down. I have a hard time believing that. If anyone thinks they get as much out of remote participation as they do with f2f, then I think they're crazy... but you're right they shouldn't come. If it turns out a lot of people stop coming, then maybe we really don't need f2f meetings or as many of them. Or maybe it means we need to make cost the highest priority factor in meeting locations, instead of one among many must-have requirements. Or maybe it means we need to restructure how we spend and get funding. Regardless, the goal of the IETF isn't to have f2f meetings - it's a means to an end, not an end in itself. I think it's super-valuable, for both physical attendees and the output the IETF produces; and I think it's worth having it 3 times year. I *want* people to go physically. But if it's not valuable to many people, don't have them; or not as frequently. -hadriel
Re: Charging remote participants
On 8/16/13 9:53 AM, John C Klensin wrote: As someone who favors charging remote participants, who has paid most or all of the travel and associated costs for every meeting I've attended in the last ten plus years, and who doesn't share in a view of if I can, everyone can, let me make a few observations. I think these are good points, and I'd like to add: the extent to which there's now an expectation that someone must participate in a meeting in order to contribute to work is the extent to which there's been a gradual shift in working methods in the organization, and effectively reflect a loss (to whatever extent) of openness. We can stay free and open if mailing lists remain the locus of the IETF's work. The costs associated with remote participation have to be borne by someone; the marginal cost of someone joining an existing mailing list is effectively zero. Melinda
Re: Charging remote participants
On 08/16/2013 11:36 AM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote: On Aug 16, 2013, at 10:56 AM, Keith Moore mo...@network-heretics.com wrote: As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. This isn't about fairness or equal-pain-for-all. It's about getting work done and producing good output. Whether someone remote has to pay $0 or $1000 won't change your $3.5k out-of-pocket expense. If you don't feel the $3.5k was worth it for you to go physically, don't go. I'm all about having IETF get work done and produce good output. May I suggest that we start by trying to reduce IETF's longstanding bias in favor of large companies with large travel budgets that pay disproportionate attention to narrow and/or short-term interests, and against academics and others who take a wider and/or longer view? The Internet has suffered tremendously due to a lack of a long-term view in IETF. To that end, I'd like to see IETF do what it can to reduce meeting costs for those who attend face-to-face, rather than increase those costs even more in order to subsidize remote participation. I have reached the difficult (i.e. expensive) conclusion that the only way to participate effectively in IETF (except perhaps in a narrow focus area) is to regularly attend face-to-face meetings. There are several reasons for this, just a few of which (off the top of my head) are: (1) It's really hard to understand where people are coming from unless/until you've met them in person. I had been participating in IETF for about a year before I showed up at my first meeting, and I still remember how (2) It's much easier to get a sense of how a group of people react to a proposal in person, than over email. (3) For several reasons, people seem to react to ideas more favorably when discussed face-to-face. (4) It's easier to get along well with people whom you see face-to-face on at least an occasional basis, so people whom you've met face-to-face are more likely to appreciate constructive suggestions and to interpret technical criticism as helpful input rather than personal attacks. (5) Among the many things that hallway conversations are good for are quickly settling misunderstandings and resolving disputes. I realize that a better remote participation experience might help with some or all of these, but I think we're decades away from being able to realize that quality of experience via remote participation, at least without developing new technology and spending a lot more money on equipment. If someone wants to fund development of that technology and purchase of that equipment separately from the normal IETF revenue stream, more power to them. But I do suspect that at some point it will cost money to maintain that technology and equipment, and again, I suspect it shouldn't primarily come from people who are paying to be there in person. Or if we're really about trying to make IETF as open as possible, then we should be willing to publicly declare that people can participate in face-to-face meetings without paying the registration fee. [*] But I don't think that IETF's current funding model can support that. So maybe IAOC should give serious thought to changing the model, but offhand I don't know what a better model would be. Should IETF become a membership organization, and let some of the administrative costs be borne by membership fees, so that meeting costs can more accurately reflect the cost of hosting meetings? How would the organization provide benefits to paying members without excluding participation from others? I don't expect that there are any obviously right answers to questions like those - everything involves compromise - but it might be that there are far better answers to those questions than those that have been assumed for the past 20 years or so. [*] I do realize that some people have, on occasion, shown up as tourists for the benefit of hallway and bar conversations, and avoided paying the meeting fee.
Re: Charging remote participants
I may be misunderstanding you, but I'm proposing we charge large corporations with large travel budgets slightly *more* than others.[1] I'm not suggesting an overhaul of the system. I'm not proposing they get more attention, or more weight, or any such thing. Of course they *do* have more impact in subtle ways, because they can afford to send people and hire IETF insiders and pay salaries for people to be ADs and WG chairs and so on. That's a separate issue, which we've long fretted about but can't truly address, nor am I proposing to fix it nor make it worse. I'm just trying to fix the problem at hand. (well... it would only be a problem if people think we need better remote participation tools) -hadriel [1] Large corporations don't actually equate to large travel budgets; big corps have travel freezes all the time. But if you can get expense approval for $695 reg-fee, you can likely get approval for $795; and the reg-fee is only a portion of the overall travel expense. If you *can't* get approval for the $100 difference, that's ok - just select the Self-Paying Rate. There's no stigma associated with doing that. (at least that's the goal anyway) On Aug 16, 2013, at 3:10 PM, Keith Moore mo...@network-heretics.com wrote: On 08/16/2013 11:36 AM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote: On Aug 16, 2013, at 10:56 AM, Keith Moore mo...@network-heretics.com wrote: As someone who just spent $3.5K out of pocket to show up in Berlin, I have a hard time being sympathetic to someone who won't participate because he has to spend $100 out of pocket. This isn't about fairness or equal-pain-for-all. It's about getting work done and producing good output. Whether someone remote has to pay $0 or $1000 won't change your $3.5k out-of-pocket expense. If you don't feel the $3.5k was worth it for you to go physically, don't go. I'm all about having IETF get work done and produce good output. May I suggest that we start by trying to reduce IETF's longstanding bias in favor of large companies with large travel budgets that pay disproportionate attention to narrow and/or short-term interests, and against academics and others who take a wider and/or longer view? The Internet has suffered tremendously due to a lack of a long-term view in IETF. To that end, I'd like to see IETF do what it can to reduce meeting costs for those who attend face-to-face, rather than increase those costs even more in order to subsidize remote participation. I have reached the difficult (i.e. expensive) conclusion that the only way to participate effectively in IETF (except perhaps in a narrow focus area) is to regularly attend face-to-face meetings. There are several reasons for this, just a few of which (off the top of my head) are: (1) It's really hard to understand where people are coming from unless/until you've met them in person. I had been participating in IETF for about a year before I showed up at my first meeting, and I still remember how (2) It's much easier to get a sense of how a group of people react to a proposal in person, than over email. (3) For several reasons, people seem to react to ideas more favorably when discussed face-to-face. (4) It's easier to get along well with people whom you see face-to-face on at least an occasional basis, so people whom you've met face-to-face are more likely to appreciate constructive suggestions and to interpret technical criticism as helpful input rather than personal attacks. (5) Among the many things that hallway conversations are good for are quickly settling misunderstandings and resolving disputes. I realize that a better remote participation experience might help with some or all of these, but I think we're decades away from being able to realize that quality of experience via remote participation, at least without developing new technology and spending a lot more money on equipment. If someone wants to fund development of that technology and purchase of that equipment separately from the normal IETF revenue stream, more power to them. But I do suspect that at some point it will cost money to maintain that technology and equipment, and again, I suspect it shouldn't primarily come from people who are paying to be there in person. Or if we're really about trying to make IETF as open as possible, then we should be willing to publicly declare that people can participate in face-to-face meetings without paying the registration fee. [*] But I don't think that IETF's current funding model can support that. So maybe IAOC should give serious thought to changing the model, but offhand I don't know what a better model would be. Should IETF become a membership organization, and let some of the administrative costs be borne by membership fees, so that meeting costs can more accurately reflect the cost of hosting meetings? How would the organization provide benefits to paying
Re: Charging remote participants
On Aug 16, 2013, at 1:53 PM, John C Klensin john-i...@jck.com wrote: (1) As Dave points out, this activity has never been free. The question is only about who pays. If any participants have to pay (or convince their companies to pay) and others, as a matter of categories, do not, that ultimately weakens the process even if, most of the time, those who pay don't expect or get favored treatment. Having some participants get a free ride that really comes at the expense of other participants (and potentially competing organizations) is just not a healthy idea. Baloney. People physically present still have an advantage over those remote, no matter how much technology we throw at this. That's why corporations are willing to pay their employees to travel to these meetings. And it's why people are willing to pay out-of-pocket for it too, ultimately. It's why people want a day-pass type thing for only attending one meeting, instead of sitting at home attending remote. Being there is important, and corporations and people know it. An audio input model (ie, conference call model) still provides plenty of advantage to physical attendees, while also providing remote participants a chance to have their say in a more emphatic and real-time format. We're not talking about building a telepresence system for all remote participants, or using robots as avatars. (2) Trying to figure out exactly what remote participation (equipment, staffing, etc.) will cost the IETF and then trying to assess those costs to the remote participants would be madness for multiple reasons. [...snip...] Yet you're proposing charging remote participants to bear the costs. I'm confused. (3) Trying to establish a more or less elaborate system of categories of participants with category-specific fees or to scale the current system of subsidies and waivers to accommodate the full range of potential in-person and remote participants is almost equally insane. While we might make such arrangements work and keeping categories and status off badges helps, it gets us entangled with requiring that the Secretariat and/or IAD and/or some IAOC or other leadership members be privy to information that is at least private and that might be formally confidential. We don't want to go there if we can help it. I'm not talking about posting this info on web, nor a full range of potential. We already have multiple reg-fee categories; I'm talking about adding *one* more. I don't know who in the leadership can see a list of what rates people paid - if we need to constrain that, that's a solvable problem. It's not the sky falling. Regardless, the same argument can be made for charging remote participants to donate 0-100% or whatever. -hadriel
Re: Charging remote participants
We already have a version of self-pay, namely the very low student rate. For that rate, you are supposed to show student ID (not sure how and whether this is enforced), so it's not quite the same, but it's a means-based test, as well as an attempt to increase the diversity of participants. Nearly every scientific conference has versions of differentiated pricing - special rates for authors, attendees from low-income countries, students, society members (i.e., likely repeat attendees), ... In those venues, the general rule of thumb for organizers is that even the lowest priced category pays for the variable costs, and the fixed costs are borne by those more able to pay. We also have the early-registration rate - thus, late and on-site registrations subsidize the early bird moochers. We presumably want to encourage building a community, and that includes making it possible for people to attend who might not otherwise be able to. Our objective is not one-time revenue optimization. Many individuals switch back-and-forth between traveling on their own dime and on corporate tabs, and we want to encourage continued engagement, if only to increase our supply of Nomcom-eligibles. Thus, I think this is worth exploring, as an experiment, just like we started the day-pass experiment a number of years ago. Henning I'm not talking about posting this info on web, nor a full range of potential. We already have multiple reg-fee categories; I'm talking about adding *one* more. I don't know who in the leadership can see a list of what rates people paid - if we need to constrain that, that's a solvable problem. It's not the sky falling. Regardless, the same argument can be made for charging remote participants to donate 0-100% or whatever. -hadriel
Re: Charging remote participants
On Aug 16, 2013, at 1:42 PM, Henning Schulzrinne h...@cs.columbia.edu wrote: We already have a version of self-pay, namely the very low student rate. For that rate, you are supposed to show student ID (not sure how and whether this is enforced), so it's not quite the same, but it's a means-based test, as well as an attempt to increase the diversity of participants. Nearly every scientific conference has versions of differentiated pricing - special rates for authors, attendees from low-income countries, students, society members (i.e., likely repeat attendees), ... In those venues, the general rule of thumb for organizers is that even the lowest priced category pays for the variable costs, and the fixed costs are borne by those more able to pay. We also have the early-registration rate - thus, late and on-site registrations subsidize the early bird moochers. We presumably want to encourage building a community, and that includes making it possible for people to attend who might not otherwise be able to. Our objective is not one-time revenue optimization. Many individuals switch back-and-forth between traveling on their own dime and on corporate tabs, and we want to encourage continued engagement, if only to increase our supply of Nomcom-eligibles. Thus, I think this is worth exploring, as an experiment, just like we started the day-pass experiment a number of years ago. I don't know what this refers to in the above sentence, but I agree with everything else in your note. Mark Henning I'm not talking about posting this info on web, nor a full range of potential. We already have multiple reg-fee categories; I'm talking about adding *one* more. I don't know who in the leadership can see a list of what rates people paid - if we need to constrain that, that's a solvable problem. It's not the sky falling. Regardless, the same argument can be made for charging remote participants to donate 0-100% or whatever. -hadriel
Re: Charging remote participants
--On Friday, August 16, 2013 15:46 -0400 Hadriel Kaplan hadriel.kap...@oracle.com wrote: On Aug 16, 2013, at 1:53 PM, John C Klensin john-i...@jck.com wrote: (1) As Dave points out, this activity has never been free. The question is only about who pays. If any participants have to pay (or convince their companies to pay) and others, as a matter of categories, do not, that ultimately weakens the process even if, most of the time, those who pay don't expect or get favored treatment. Having some participants get a free ride that really comes at the expense of other participants (and potentially competing organizations) is just not a healthy idea. Baloney. People physically present still have an advantage over those remote, no matter how much technology we throw at this. That's why corporations are willing to pay their employees to travel to these meetings. And it's why people are willing to pay out-of-pocket for it too, ultimately. It's why people want a day-pass type thing for only attending one meeting, instead of sitting at home attending remote. Being there is important, and corporations and people know it. Sure. And it is an entirely separate issue, one which I don't know how to solve (if it can be solved at all). It is unsolvable in part because corporations --especially the larger and more successful ones-- make their decisions about what to participate in, at what levels, and with whatever choices of people, for whatever presumably-good business reasons they do so. I can, for example, remember one such corporation refusing to participate in a standards committee that was working on something that many of us thought was key to their primary product. None us knew, then or now, why they made that decision although their was wide speculation at the time that they intended to deliberately violate the standard that emerged and wanted plausible deniability about participation. Lots of reasons; lots of circumstances. An audio input model (ie, conference call model) still provides plenty of advantage to physical attendees, while also providing remote participants a chance to have their say in a more emphatic and real-time format. We're not talking about building a telepresence system for all remote participants, or using robots as avatars. IIR, we've tried audio input. It works really well for conference-sized meetings (e.g., a dozen or two dozen people around a table) with a few remote participants. It works really well for a larger group (50 or 100 or more) and one or two remote participants. I've even co-chaired IETF WG meetings remotely that way (with a lot of help and sympathy from the other co-chair or someone else taking an in-room leadership role). But, try it for several remote participants and a large room full of people, allow for audio delays in both directions, and about the last thing one needs is a bunch of disembodied voices coming out of the in-room audio system at times that are not really coordinated with what is going on in the room. Now it can all certainly be made to work: it takes a bit of coordination on a chat (or equivalent) channel, requests to get in or out of the queue that are monitored from within the room, and someone managing those queues along with the mic lines. But, by that point, many of the disadvantage of audio input relative to someone reading from Jabber have disappeared and the other potential problems with audio input -- noise, level setting, people who are hard to understand even if they are in the room, and so on-- start to dominate. Would I prefer audio input to typing into Jabber under the right conditions? Sure, in part because, while I type faster than average it still isn't fast enough to compensate for the various delays. But it really isn't a panacea for any of the significant problems. (2) Trying to figure out exactly what remote participation (equipment, staffing, etc.) will cost the IETF and then trying to assess those costs to the remote participants would be madness for multiple reasons. [...snip...] Yet you're proposing charging remote participants to bear the costs. I'm confused. I am proposing charging remote participants a portion of the overhead costs of operating the IETF, _not_ a fee based on the costs of supporting remote participation. And, again, I want them to have the option of deciding how much of it they can reasonably afford to pay. ... best, john
Re: Charging remote participants
On Friday, August 16, 2013 18:39:04 John C Klensin wrote: --On Friday, August 16, 2013 15:46 -0400 Hadriel Kaplan hadriel.kap...@oracle.com wrote: On Aug 16, 2013, at 1:53 PM, John C Klensin john-i...@jck.com wrote: (1) As Dave points out, this activity has never been free. The question is only about who pays. If any participants have to pay (or convince their companies to pay) and others, as a matter of categories, do not, that ultimately weakens the process even if, most of the time, those who pay don't expect or get favored treatment. Having some participants get a free ride that really comes at the expense of other participants (and potentially competing organizations) is just not a healthy idea. Baloney. People physically present still have an advantage over those remote, no matter how much technology we throw at this. That's why corporations are willing to pay their employees to travel to these meetings. And it's why people are willing to pay out-of-pocket for it too, ultimately. It's why people want a day-pass type thing for only attending one meeting, instead of sitting at home attending remote. Being there is important, and corporations and people know it. Sure. And it is an entirely separate issue, one which I don't know how to solve (if it can be solved at all). It is unsolvable in part because corporations --especially the larger and more successful ones-- make their decisions about what to participate in, at what levels, and with whatever choices of people, for whatever presumably-good business reasons they do so. I can, for example, remember one such corporation refusing to participate in a standards committee that was working on something that many of us thought was key to their primary product. None us knew, then or now, why they made that decision although their was wide speculation at the time that they intended to deliberately violate the standard that emerged and wanted plausible deniability about participation. Lots of reasons; lots of circumstances. An audio input model (ie, conference call model) still provides plenty of advantage to physical attendees, while also providing remote participants a chance to have their say in a more emphatic and real-time format. We're not talking about building a telepresence system for all remote participants, or using robots as avatars. IIR, we've tried audio input. It works really well for conference-sized meetings (e.g., a dozen or two dozen people around a table) with a few remote participants. It works really well for a larger group (50 or 100 or more) and one or two remote participants. I've even co-chaired IETF WG meetings remotely that way (with a lot of help and sympathy from the other co-chair or someone else taking an in-room leadership role). But, try it for several remote participants and a large room full of people, allow for audio delays in both directions, and about the last thing one needs is a bunch of disembodied voices coming out of the in-room audio system at times that are not really coordinated with what is going on in the room. Now it can all certainly be made to work: it takes a bit of coordination on a chat (or equivalent) channel, requests to get in or out of the queue that are monitored from within the room, and someone managing those queues along with the mic lines. But, by that point, many of the disadvantage of audio input relative to someone reading from Jabber have disappeared and the other potential problems with audio input -- noise, level setting, people who are hard to understand even if they are in the room, and so on-- start to dominate. Would I prefer audio input to typing into Jabber under the right conditions? Sure, in part because, while I type faster than average it still isn't fast enough to compensate for the various delays. But it really isn't a panacea for any of the significant problems. (2) Trying to figure out exactly what remote participation (equipment, staffing, etc.) will cost the IETF and then trying to assess those costs to the remote participants would be madness for multiple reasons. [...snip...] Yet you're proposing charging remote participants to bear the costs. I'm confused. I am proposing charging remote participants a portion of the overhead costs of operating the IETF, _not_ a fee based on the costs of supporting remote participation. And, again, I want them to have the option of deciding how much of it they can reasonably afford to pay. Maybe the IETF should charge for mailing list subscriptions too? Scott K
Re: Charging remote participants
On Aug 16, 2013, at 6:39 PM, John C Klensin john-i...@jck.com wrote: IIR, we've tried audio input. It works really well for conference-sized meetings (e.g., a dozen or two dozen people around a table) with a few remote participants. It works really well for a larger group (50 or 100 or more) and one or two remote participants. I've even co-chaired IETF WG meetings remotely that way (with a lot of help and sympathy from the other co-chair or someone else taking an in-room leadership role). But, try it for several remote participants and a large room full of people, allow for audio delays in both directions, and about the last thing one needs is a bunch of disembodied voices coming out of the in-room audio system at times that are not really coordinated with what is going on in the room. Now it can all certainly be made to work: it takes a bit of coordination on a chat (or equivalent) channel, requests to get in or out of the queue that are monitored from within the room, and someone managing those queues along with the mic lines. Yup, it definitely takes those things. Been there, done that, got the IETF t-shirt. :) I think we might be able to do it, using the jabber scribes for those coordination actions. Maybe. It depends on the number of remote active participants and quality of scribes. The jabber scribes would have to act like the operator-assisting person in big conferences with remote participants. (the old we've got a question from Jane Doe, go ahead Jane type thing) For the WGs I go to (RAI area mostly), we have good scribes and not a large number of remote people who actually participate (as opposed to monitor). We've had some exceptions, but my impression is the things the remote people wanted to say in those cases were usually said by someone locally anyway so they're more of a +1 thing. I.e., if there are lots of local attendees, you usually get someone saying what you were going to say anyway. Not that someone remote shouldn't say it as well, because it does matter if you hear the same thing being repeated. But at least it's not so much interaction needed for hearing that. But yes if there are a dozen remote active participants, and a 100 people locally in the room, it's chaos. It's not chaos because the remote participants don't get mic time - it's chaos because they *do* get mic time. The delay in letting them know it's their turn at the mic, delay in real-time interaction, the mental switch to remote mode for local participants, etc., all cause the meeting to slow down... a lot. It's like multiple processes running on one CPU - context switching is painful. We can try to pile up the remote participants to go all at once, so that there're fewer context switches. That's what folks do in big conferences: the remote participants are queued up until the local ones have finished, and then the remote ones go all at once. Unfortunately that turns it into a QA type thing at the end, and not a discussion, but with that big an active audience that's probably all it could be anyway. But, by that point, many of the disadvantage of audio input relative to someone reading from Jabber have disappeared and the other potential problems with audio input -- noise, level setting, people who are hard to understand even if they are in the room, and so on-- start to dominate. Yes, audio quality and volume control and a bunch of related things are very important for this to work. IANAE on that - there are professionals who do that stuff for a living. Would I prefer audio input to typing into Jabber under the right conditions? Sure, in part because, while I type faster than average it still isn't fast enough to compensate for the various delays. But it really isn't a panacea for any of the significant problems. OK, so what are the significant problems? What have the WGs you've been participating in not been doing, that makes you feel like you don't get to participate remotely? -hadriel
Re: Charging remote participants
Thus, I think this is worth exploring, as an experiment, just like we started the day-pass experiment a number of years ago. I don't know what this refers to in the above sentence, but I agree with everything else in your note. Offer a self-pay rate, as suggested by Hadriel. See how many people take it and ask them whether that made a difference in their attendance. Henning
