Hi,
It may not be line a hiring manager, but all those who have budget can make it
a point to make sure some of the younger engineers get to some of the meetings,
at least the ones that are relatively local to them. I assume that many of the
older participants, have the means to influence the travel lists. For years
there have been people working on the gender balance perhaps some focus on the
age balance may become appropriate.
It was good, though to see that the distribution was not too skewed toward the
older participants.
As for bringing new work in, doesn't that take a plan for introducing the
subject and showing why it is relevant to the IETF community. Although, knowing
you, you probably had such a plan. I think that the technical privacy issues,
for example, while belonging in the IETF, might still feel strange to some of
the traditional engineering participants. So in this case, you may need to
promote a slight cultural change that accepts privacy as a requirement as well
as the technical challenge of the issue.
avri
On 2 May 2012, at 15:14, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
Hi PHB,
the IETF is not like an enterprise where you can decide (as part of the
hiring process) what characteristics your employees should have.
In a volunteer organization the offered topics drive the participation. Ask
yourself: what you as someone who just finished a university education want
to hang around in the IETF to standardize yet another IPv4/IPv6 transition
mechanism or to participate in the MPLS-TP discussions?
When people suggest new work to the IETF they often see a strange reaction. I
remember when Mozilla came to the IETF and proposed to work on the privacy
topic "Do Not Track". I couldn't find support for doing the work in the IETF.
I don't exactly know why people didn't like it but the W3C immediately picked
it up and had seen lots of new companies (mostly from the advertising
industry) joining the W3C.
Ciao
Hannes