- Each of the confirming bodies (the ISOC Board for the IAB, the
IAB for the IESG, and the IESG for the IAOC) could make a
public statement at the beginning of each year's nominations
process that they will not confirm a slate unless it
contributes to increased diversity within the IETF leadership,
or it is accompanied by a detailed explanation of what
steps were taken to select a more diverse slate and why it was
not possible to do so.
That sounds a lot like quotas. Let's not go there. It would be
entirely reasonable to tell future nomcoms that increased diversity
(for some definition of diversity) is one of their goals and expect
them to do their job in good faith, as nomcoms have consistently done.
A large point that you've only touched on is that we can't create
diversity by fiat. While it is admirable in some ways that many of
the people active in the IETF now are the same people who were active
in the IETF and its predecessors 20 or 30 years ago, it's also kind of
scary, since nobody is immortal (although in a few cases it may seem
that way.)
In some senses the IETF is phenomenally open, since anyone with an
e-mail address can sign up for the mailing lists and join the fun, but
in other ways it's really difficult to break in, partly because the
topics can be complex and subtle, partly because of a (not wholly
unreasonable) impatience with people who out of ignorance or otherwise
want to reopen ancient arguments, or who imagine that the way to
define a standard is to create a kitchen sink of everyone's favorite
featurettes. (No, it's not better to support both XML and JSON than
just one of them.) These are reasonably straightforward to deal with,
largely by pointing people at list archives, the Tao, and other things
we've written over the years.
What concerns me more is that people who could contribute don't. Part
of that is because some parts of the IETF have become ossified, which
is an issue I don't want to address here, but a lot of it is that
people still just don't know who we are. The IRTF's newish ANRP looks
like a good model, it picks promising students who probably wouldn't
pay any attention to us, and waves a small prize and a junket to an
IETF meeting at them. The quality of the papers has been very good,
but equally important, they go back home and tell their friends about
their favorable experience at the IETF/IRTF.
There's only so many prizes we can hand out, but I think it's worth
thinking about what other modest inducements we might come up with to
get people who would be good IETFers to give us a look.
R's,
John