mirjak / draft-kuehlewind-shmoo-remote-fee Goto Github PK

draft-ietf-shmoo-remote-fee.md:

Acknowledgments section:

Thanks to everybody involved in the shmoo working group discussion, esepcially Brian Carpenter, Jason Livingood, [...]

s/esepcially/especially/

Considerations on Use and Misuse of a Free Participation Option section:

Since some participants may be self-funded, the first two sentences of the second paragraph could be rewritten as:

It is expected that participants who have (or have access to) the financial means to use the paid regular registration option will do so. Paying a registration fee is a way to support the IETF.

Also, IMO, the third sentence of the second paragraph isn't needed, and could be misconstrued as encouragement of late payments.

CONTRIBUTING.md:

The boilerplate information was never updated.

I can submit a PR if you wish.

Sponsor organizations receive a limited number of free registrations, based on their sponsor level. A remote meeting does not incur all the travel costs normally borne by those organizations. Should we encourage organizations to donate some of their free registrations to a fee waiver program, if they can afford it? Alternatively, should we encourage them to apply those registrations to members of their communities that might not otherwise attend?

Text proposed by Brian Carpenter via email:
"Free registration is not intended for use by businesses to avoid paying
their fair share of the IETF's running costs. Whatever conditions are
used to qualify participants for free participation, the IETF retains
the right to deny free registration to participants whose business sponsor
is clearly able to pay its fair share."

Elsewhere, Lars wrote:

"I'll note that there remain some internal inconsistencies in the document that need to be addressed, for example, the very next paragraph says "regardless of whether the meeting has a physical presence", which implies the principles intend to hybrid meetings, which as discussed on the list they can't (at least not at BCP-level strength.) And further down it says "if remote participation is provided, there should always be a free option", which has similar issues."

I guess if we want we could be even more clear/make stronger statements of the value of this principle in a) keeping the process open which is seen widely as a big benefit of the IETF compared to other SDOs and b) attracting new participants which is essential for the sustainability of the IETF and c) preserving expertise and knowledge indepentent of someone's employment constraints.

I think it could be good to add a statement that any free option needs to be well communicated and that there is at least anecdotal evidence that due to the late changes and potentially unclear communication some people did not register to IETF-108 as they were just note aware of the free waiver.

Some textual nitpicking:

I don't think it is correct to say "because most participants paid in-person fees, ", i think the reason was "because a) the in-person attendants paid and b) their numbers where sufficient to support the meeting". This may be important because there is ultimately the question of the total number of paying attendants.

After reciting rfc3935 it might be useful to state that the IETF has interpreted "open" to mean "open and free (of charge)". That might have been implicit in rfc3935 but it is not anymore, hence more modern terms like FOSS (Free and Open...).

Maybe add something to the extend of: If paid remote attendance is counted towards NomCom eligibility then so must free online attendance.

Not quite sure how how to define differences in paid vs. free attendance, but for example t-shirts could of course NOT be given to free attendants. Aka: may make sense to figure out text for this.