[Ecn-sane] [tsvwg] travel funds for ietf for the next SCE talk?

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 11-May-19 02:12, Joe Touch wrote:
> 
> 
>> On May 10, 2019, at 7:00 AM, Ted Lemon <mellon at fugue.com <mailto:mellon at fugue.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On May 10, 2019, at 9:47 AM, Joe Touch <touch at strayalpha.com <mailto:touch at strayalpha.com>> wrote:
>>> The only  people who get a fully free ride that I know of are the IEEE Comsoc Board. 
>>
>> Hm.  I’ve never paid to attend IETF.  Granted, this is not because IETF comped me, but because I was fortunate enough to have an employer who could afford to send me at no cost to me.
>>
>> This model unfortunately doesn’t work for open source developers who are not on the payroll of a company with deep pockets.
> 
> Nor academics. I stopped coming because I couldn’t find a gov’t agency interested in supporting my participation either (and my current employer doesn’t either).
> 
> This is a problem not only for general attendance but also for the IESG - which impacts some decisions being made as well.

Of course. But none of this is new and the world is a hard place. I missed one of the vital meetings of the IPng Directorate in 1994, the meeting that was the last chance for a major change of direction for what would become IPv6, because my then employer (CERN) had limited travel funds. I've always regretted missing that meeting. Too bad for me.

On 11-May-19 06:19, Keith Moore wrote:

> On 5/10/19 11:53 AM, Ted Lemon wrote:
> 
>> On May 10, 2019, at 11:10 AM, Tom Herbert <tom at herbertland.com <mailto:tom at herbertland.com>> wrote:
>>> Maybe there should be a "non-sponsored" registration tier with a discount to help make it affordable for the little guys.
>>
>> The problem is figuring out a sustainability model for IETF that doesn’t rely on attendance fees and hotel stays.
> 
> 
> And this has been a problem since the early 1990s when the US government stopped subsidizing the meetings (and perhaps also the secretariat?).   But I wish we'd try harder to find that sustainability model rather than constantly punting the problem, because the Internet has been suffering for all that time from a lack of diverse participation in IETF.

I don't see how the IETF is supposed to fix the fact that independent open source developers are, um, independent. There is no money tree. And if you change the model such that funded attendees are subsidising unfunded attendees in significant numbers, guess what? The number of funded attendees will rapidly decline. It seems to me that the current focus on improving remote attendance facilities is really the best we can do, but again: if remote attendance really becomes as good as on-site attendance, the number of funded atttendees will rapidly decline.

I think that if there was a viable answer to this problem, we'd already have found it.

    Brian