On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 1:28 AM, Eric Burger
<eburger(_at_)standardstrack(_dot_)com>wrote:
Quite the contrary. I am interpreting a few of the 'diversity' posts as
saying the IETF has fewer companies participating and much fewer smaller
companies participating. And I am interpreting those posts as implying some
nefarious plot on the part of large, Western, White-European-Male-Dominated
companies to make it that way. I was just positing that the IETF might be
reflective of the networking industry as a whole.
My thesis, not at all proven and one I am not married to, is there are
fewer *companies* out there. With fewer companies, we should not be
surprised there are fewer companies participating. On the big side, a ton
of major players either merged or left the business. On the small side, a
bunch of companies either got acquired or went bankrupt.
It's not a nefarious plot; all the meetings I've had with the rest of the
Western White European Male Cabal haven't discussed the IETF at all,
they're mostly on about the outrageous cost of fuel, these days. Quite
honestly I'm thinking of leaving.
But I suspect the idea that there are fewer companies when the word
"startup" seems to automatically imply something Internet related is wrong.
There's plenty of small companies, but engagement in the IETF is either
irrelevant - because the IETF has slipped lower down the stack - or too
expensive - because when you have fewer than 10 people in your
organization, losing one engineer for half a day a week of IETF activity
represents 1%, whereas if you've a company of even "just" a thousand,
losing an engineer to the IESG full time is an order of magnitude less.
That's not considering the cost as an issue, which it undoubtedly is for a
small company, especially those outside the US for whom the travel costs
are higher.
I think the IETF leadership could solve the stack problem by being more
proactive about encouraging standardization work to be brought into the
IETF - I think having WebFinger here, for example, is very useful at making
the IETF relevant to the startup audience, as it were, and there are
several other of these small, high-stack protocols that would benefit from
being worked on in the IETF and would benefit the IETF too.
Dave.