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Re: team to look at diversity

2013-04-02 01:09:06
Jari,

this is great news.  A design team approach may be able to collect
information and generate ideas and actionable points in a way that
works much better than ranting on the IETF list.

The most important insight is that diversity is not a "problem" that
can be "fixed" by some set of measures, but a process that needs to be
ongoing.

Of course, that process can still be supported by specific measures,
and you have to have a diverse view to find out what might work.

I would like to pick two items here.  Both are not going to help for
all dimensions of diversity, or "fix the diversity problem", but it's
the small steps that will make a difference.  My items are:

-- Reducing situations that are perceived as hostile by members of
   specific groups.

-- Working on incentive structures that are useful for diverse groups.

Re hostility: I think most of us like to think they know what this
means for gender, ethnicity (but we sure can still get a lot better in
acting on that knowledge, and in increasing consciousness).  We are
not always very good at accommodating people with limited command of
the English language (yesterday's "Diana Raft" thing was great comic
relief here) -- keeping the process efficient is one thing, being
insensitive clods another.  Some groups think they know it all and
dismiss input from other groups in an aggressive way (folks:
"academic" is not a pejorative!).  I don't even know what other people
might perceive as hostile; that would be good input for the design
team.

Re incentives: Just an example that I happen to know about: academia
has a need for authorship recognition -- but that need is regularly
dismissed by people that come from different groups (in a way that
feels like utter contempt, back to the hostility point).  What can we
improve with respect to the incentive structures for other groups,
say, people from operators or from small businesses?  Again, something
that people from the various groups could contribute their thoughts
about toward the design team.

I'm not trying to make the design team the "diversity ombudsman", but
providing a somewhat sensitive and possibly confidential atmosphere
for offering thoughts like these might help.

Grüße, Carsten


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