Since the topic keeps getting raised... I think that charging remote participants any fee is a really terrible idea. One of the really great things about the IETF is its open and free (as in beer) participation policy. The real work is supposed to be done on mailing lists, and there's no charge or restriction on who can send emails. That policy is actually quite rare for standards bodies, and makes our output better not worse.
Obviously we discuss things and do real work at physical meetings too, and they're not simply social occasions. At the end of the day we actually want people to come to the physical meetings, but the realities of life make that impossible for many. But charging remote participants for better tools/experience isn't the answer. At least for me, whenever I'm discussing a draft mechanism I actually *want* input from remote participants. I don't want it to be only from folks who can afford to provide input. I want it from people who can't get approval for even a $100 expense, from people who are between jobs, people from academia, and even from just plain ordinary users rather than just vendors or big corps. At one time we worried that free remote participation would lead to too many random participants to get work done, but that hasn't become a problem afaict. Please don't whittle it down further to only those who can afford it. I would do anything whatsoever to avoid charging remote participants, even if it means raising the fee for f2f attendees to subsidize remote-participant tooling costs. In that vein, I think a lot of the f2f attendees get our reg-fee paid by our employer and another $50 or even $100 isn't going to make a bit of difference for us - for those whom it would make a difference, I'd create another category of f2f registration fee like 'Self-paying Attendee' or some such. Selecting the new category would drop your fee by the $50 or $100, but wouldn't change what gets displayed on your badge or anything. It would be purely optional, with no guilt attached for not paying it and no visible difference to anyone else. Just put some words on the registration form page saying something like "If you cannot expense your registration fee, please select the 'Self-paying Attendee' category" or something like that. Or make it some checkbox thingy. I believe the majority of folks who can expense it will not have difficulty expensing a 'Regular Attendee' charge so long as it doesn't say we opted to pay more. -hadriel p.s. Even from a purely practical standpoint, charging remote participants raises a lot of issues - we debate incessantly just about the f2f day-pass, and that's nothing compared to this. For example: if things break during the meeting session, do we re-imburse them? Do we pro-rate the re-imbursement based on how many of their meetings had technical issues with audio or video? Do we charge a flat fee for the whole week of meetings, or just charge per meeting session, or depending on how long the session is? Do we charge students a different rate, like we do f2f reg-fees? Do we need to provide tech support with a specific SLA? This while thing is a can of worms. It's not worth it.
