Thanks for raising this.
I believe an IETF with more diverse participation and leadership would be a
stronger IETF. When we have more diverse experiences and viewpoints, our
results will be better and more generally applicable. Participants from
different places, cultures, men, women, and people in different situations. One
of the challenges that I have identified as I am taking the IETF chair task is
to make the IETF even more international and more diverse.
I would be very happy to create a design team to come up with analysis of the
situation and recommendations for actions that we can take. The first thing
that I plan to do is to find a leader or two for the design team. If you think
you would be willing to lead this effort, please send me e-mail.
I would also like to make a couple of other observations. First, even if there
is plenty of work to do in this area, we should also recognise how much has
already happened, and be proud of that progress. IETF documents have authors
from roughly sixty different countries from six continents. On some areas we've
witnessed a tremendously positive development. But those developments take
time. Take China, for example. Participation has gone from 2% to 11% in a
couple of years. At the same time, we've seen Chinese participants start from
participation and I-D submission and progress to succeeding in publishing RFCs,
and becoming a part of the leadership. For instance, in the Internet Area we
have two WG chairs from China, and now in March Xing Li has become an IAB
member. A while ago Russ moved the Atlanta meeting to IETF-85 to reduce the
effects of visa trouble that we kept having in US meetings. We keep training
new people for working group chair positions and editors, and in g!
eneral try to get new participants, companies, and countries involved. ISOC
has a program to bring in more participants from new areas of the world, and I
look forward to meeting some of them this week. Please chat with the newcomers
and get them involved in your IETF work, or help them with the issues they have
in the Internet!
I think all this is great. But also a trend that needs to continue. And
repeated for others. For instance, what does it take to get South American or
African participation up in the same manner as China? While we have some
participants from those areas, the numbers are very, very low. As an aside, the
IAOC is investigating the possibility of a meeting in South America and we are
also looking at running a live connection of the Berlin meeting to another
continent to attract additional participants. Obviously, much more needs to be
done to make the significant change that is needed.
Also, I think we want to continue with a model where choices for picking people
for IETF roles is still done on the basis of picking the best person for the
job. I think we should take things like gender and geographical location as
inputs to those choices. Just like we already do with many other things, such
as specific protocol competence spread,
technical/management/governance/communications competence, operator/vendor
background, ability to engage with the user and business communities, and so
on. I only have personal experience about selecting working group chairs and
document editors. But I think we already do take all of these factors into
account at least in some cases, but further emphasis on this would be good. I'm
sure everyone else who is making personnel decisions in the IETF is also quite
aware of the need to support diversity. Of course, we do not always get to make
the choices we would like. Sometimes we lack the candidates that we think we
need. Sometimes we!
have a great candidate for some task, but for a business reason they do not
have the support to take a full-time leadership position. Sometimes the random
appearance of a new business in some part of the world drives the influx of new
people from that region. We are not in full control of these external effects.
Finally, I think we need to take diversity in the broadest sense. It should
include at least the following aspects: gender, geographical location, culture,
age, and type of background or business where you work in. For instance, I
think the IETF would benefit greatly from getting more younger generation
participants, and we should work hard to attract them and topics that interest
them. And I do not think we can just focus on the leadership. The basis for
increased diversity in the leadership is increased diversity in IETF
participation in general.
In short - this is very important and deserves further work. That work will be
hard, it is about training new people and attracting new participants and
convincing new people about taking on leadership positions. But I am sure we
will make a lot of progress on this, and the design team would be important in
helping the leadership understand what actions we can take. So thanks again for
making the suggestion.
Jari Arkko