Subject: [admin-discuss] Consultation on the financial aspects of COVID-Impacted meetings

From: George Michaelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2021 14:14:26 +1000

These seem workable proposals. They balance out cost saving with
functionality, and do not encroach on the primary deliverable. The
primary deliverable is document production.

The costs to secondary deliverables like code sprint and hackathon are
contained. Nothing stops other funding, or even ad-hoc organisation
from taking place. Nothing here suggests that the IETF wouldn't be
cooperative, if people did that. If its not actively harmful to the
venue/bid process, this proposal is at the very least not preventing
it.

I regret that initiatives like the creche are being dropped but I
think in the risk reduction sense, It is not that the IETF doesn't
want to have a creche, its that the volume of need is going to be
significantly reduced, because the individual risk assessment
mitigates against bringing children to the meeting during this period.
Of course, for some individuals there is a high risk of this being a
barrier to entry.

I don't have an answer, but I think its reasonable for the IETF to
make a proposal and see how the community feels. I would personally
support deciding to walk this one back and invest even at some
significant cost, in providing this feature, if a critical mass of
need emerges during the planning/registration process.

Noting the proposals do not walk into WG need, I think the IETF as a
whole might want to look at a belt-tightening exercise for WG. A "is
your WG f2f really necessary" measure, but I suspect its unworkable: I
am unsure which WG is going to volunteer not to meet, beyond the
normal decisions not to meet, which are contained in the current
capacity/need planning. There are mechanisms, such as creating
artificial scarcity of some resource which becomes notional "money"
for a WG to "spend" in meeting-time, and see which WG decide to spend
their funds, or invest, or donate.

(basically, I think the IESG should be encouraged to at least THINK
about this, and I don't think its out of scope to say that, but then
stop)