I have an update relating to the diversity discussions we've had on the list
and at IETF-86. I promised that I'd set up a design team. I have found two
people to lead such a design team: Kathleen Moriarty and Suresh Krishnan. Thank
you volunteering to lead this!
Please contact them if you are interested in contributing to the work. I have
given them an open assignment, with a desire to get advice on what steps we
could take to increase participation in various aspects of the IETF, hoping for
some initial advice before the next IETF. The leaders will determine how they
want to run the team and who to select to it, but the writeup below is my input
for setting the stage and some scope for the work. The design team will present
their recommendations to the community, and engage in the discussion.
Recommendations with community support will be taken forward. The creation of
this team should not stop other efforts or proposals from going forward. For
instance, there is an independent effort in looking at improvements in
mentoring.
Jari Arkko
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For the purposes of this team, we think of diversity as something that covers
international participation, different cultures, gender, age, organisational
background, and so on. While the IETF has become a very international
organisation (with participants from 60 countries working on documents, for
instance), there are many aspects of diversity where we could do much better.
Overall participation is concentrated in some areas of the world, with little
participation from Africa and South America, for instance. Similarly, while the
IETF has some very active female participants and leadership members, the
numbers are very small. Much of the work in the IETF is driven by large
networking companies, yet academia and small companies would have more to give,
and operational experience from additional operators would be similarly
appreciated. Importantly, these disparities appear most prominently in our
leadership, where institutional and structural issues can lead to even less div!
ersity along all of the above mentioned axes than in our general population.
All organisations benefit from a healthy influx of new participants at all
levels, and in the IETF we need that to balance our well-established topics and
participants, to build the next generation technologies, experts, and leaders.
These issues are of course related to general engineering and industry issues,
and are a source of discussions in other similar organisations. But we should
not attempt to show how we match or do not match the general patterns. We
should rather just make the observation that additional diversity would be
beneficial to IETF and improve its results.
The diversity team is a design team tasked with understanding the issues we are
facing, drawing in experience from other organizations affected by similar
issues, identifying obstacles to us having the widest breadth of talented
participants and leaders, and making practical recommendations that could help
us improve the situation. It is understood that many improvements may only take
effect long-term, such as drawing in more participants from areas of the world
where the IETF has traditionally not had much participation. Nevertheless, a
set of actionable steps would be useful.
The diversity team is not charged with evaluating the particulars of current or
past Nominations Committee (Nomcom) decisions, and any discussion of ongoing
NomCom activities is out of scope. The NomCom is expected to continue to do its
utmost to recruit and appoint a top-notch and well-rounded set of people to our
leadership. The diversity team will make recommendations on actions we can take
going forward, both to increase diversity of IETF as a whole, and to help
future NomComs (and other bodies selecting people) address issues of diversity
in our leadership.