[Chapter-delegates] ISOC Elections result

[Fred Baker]

On May 27, 2008, at 9:20 AM, Franck Martin wrote:
> USD3M is roughly currently the budget to run the 3 IETF meetings,  
> and IBM, CISCO, and Comcast are already picking this up.
>
> There are less than 1000 participants at each of the 3 IETF  
> meetings. All participants are self funded and have to pay about  
> USD600 as registration fee.

Given that folks are basing expectations on these numbers, I think we  
need to correct them.

IETF meetings are generally 1100-1500 people. The registration fee  
for the Dublin meeting in July will be $635 US, $785 if submitted  
late. The IAOC's 2008 budget is $4,545,900, of which about $1.2M are  
identified as meeting expenses; the rest is RFC Editor, Secretariat,  
NOC, admin costs, etc. IBM, Cisco, and Comcast were hosts for the  
Philadelphia meeting in March, and contributed a social,  
connectivity, a network in the hotel, and a few other things - they  
by no means picked up all of the meeting expenses for the one  
meeting, let alone all of the meetings this year.

http://www.ietf.org/meetings/72/
http://iaoc.ietf.org/budget.html

> I think there was 1000 participants to INET at the best of times?

I don't have exact numbers, but that sounds about right.

> Anyhow if ISOC decide to pick up this tab (this could be possible),  
> there must be a strong advantage to spend this amount in a  
> conference rather than let's say giving it to  chapters for doing  
> good in their region. With about 100 chapters, this would be  
> 30,000USD each. Alternatively USD3M would be about 15,000-30,000 XO  
> laptops from OLPC.

I would not expect ISOC to pick up the tab for everybody to come. I  
have suggested on the board list that ISOC consider a need-based  
fellowship program, which to me makes a lot more sense.