RE: [egov] Groups - London Oasis E-gov conference added

["Peter F Brown" <peter@justbrown.net>]

Jon:
It's both: members must be able to choose the mode of participation and
there should be a level playing field that ensures that costs of
participation do not fall disproportionately.

Your comment about reconciling our global work is spot on.

Cheers,

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: jon.bosak@sun.com [mailto:jon.bosak@sun.com] 
Sent: 30 August 2005 20:19
To: egov@lists.oasis-open.org; jamie.clark@oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [egov] Groups - London Oasis E-gov conference added

[peter@justbrown.net:]

| Many OASIS TC F2F meeting take place in the USA and use dial-in 
| conference call facilities that are Toll Free from within the 
| USA/Canada only. As in individual member, if it wasn't for my employer 
| being generous, I would clock up a phone bill of $100 per dial-in 
| meeting, and *that* is a major hurdle for participation.

Agreed, but I don't see this as having anything to do with geographic
location.  The farther away you are, the more it's going to cost.  If it's
easier/cheaper for you to attend in person, then attend in person.  If it's
easier/cheaper for you to call in, then call in.  I was objecting to not
having the choice.
I don't see that there is anything OASIS can or should do about this; the
organization is not in a position to dictate either phone or travel rates.

| I guess a paid-for dial-in facility for the London meeting would be 
| acceptable, rather than nothing at all?

If you mean a facility that would allow people to call in at their own
expense, then yes, that would be better than nothing at all.

I will repeat that I don't mean to minimize either the hassle of setting up
a conference call or the limited usefulness of phone participation (let
alone the difficulty of accommodating the agenda to various people's time
zones).  We struggle with these problems every time we hold a UBL TC
meeting.  But I really don't think people understand what's going to happen
with travel costs over the next 2-3 years.  We are either going to figure
out how to conduct global business without travel or give up on the idea of
doing this work on a global basis and fall back to regional associations.

Jon

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