Hi Melinda,
I certainly agree that there are challenges in getting those who work for
smaller companies to participate in the IETF (for known reasons). I believe the
IETF, however, does better than other organizations that have expensive
membership fees.
The country/regional participation is an interesting aspect. If you try to
figure out whether the IESG / IAB leadership is dominated from US participation
then the question is what do you take as a basis for that analysis.
You could, for example, take a look at Jari's draft/RFC statistics (see
http://www.arkko.com/tools/allstats/countrydistr.html). The stats say that
50.69% of the authors come from the US.
The IETF leadership has more than 50% of persons coming from the US.
The question is, however, whether this is a good measurement to consider all
the published documents as a basis for such an analysis. Also, if you look
through the list you see Henning as the first person in that list. Henning is
German. Mark Townsley as another example, can be found in the data about
authors from France. Mark, like Henning, just moved to another country.
Ciao
Hannes
On Mar 11, 2013, at 1:32 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
On 3/11/2013 9:23 AM, Ted Hardie wrote:
So, I said this once before on a previous thread, but I still believe that
this analysis is wrong. From an organiational perspective, the aim of
fostering
diversity isn't "political correctness", it's enabling a larger pool
of candidates.
I tend to think of it as an effort to remove bias from the
system, which is probably consistent with the notion of
enabling more candidates. I think that right now there's
a far narrower set of perspectives being represented among
the I* than among the IETF participants. That's necessarily
the case when the I* is 30-odd people and there are several
thousand participants, but notably lacking among the
leadership are people who don't work for large manufacturers
and people who have first-hand knowledge of network
architectures and management practices in non-western
countries. I think that makes us weaker.
Melinda