Toerless,
A question because my institutional memory does reach as far back:
How much was Europe represented over the decades in IETF leadership ?
Right now for example IESG seems to have maybe at least 5
europeans (don't really know how to figure out location for all of them,
those where just the easy ones for me). But i would expect that this
was by far not the case going back in time.
Nobody cares about "diversity" for europeans in this round of the
discussion, but i wonder if this was equally true in the past.
Can't say much about the leadership situation, as I have not tracked it. But
there has definitely been significant increase of Europeans participating in
the IETF work over time, though most of it happened many years ago. See
http://www.arkko.com/tools/rfcstats/d-contdistrhist_norm.html Asian growth has
been a more recent occurrence.
Maybe this evolution would be a good example to folks without that long
reaching institutional memory to show how the IETF leadership
does pretty well reflect the evolution of the industry. If the
industry will become more diverse, IETF will reflect this equally.
If on the other hand we try to achieve greater diversity than the
industry, then we have a real challenge on our hand.
The concentration to fewer and larger companies in todays vs. past
leadership was mentioned in before as "bad". I think its exactly
for the same reason.
True. And the Asian growth and lack of some other parts of world reflect some
of those industry situations. But at the same time, I feel the situation is a
little bit like discussing something in a group here you actually want to hear
everyone's opinion. Since there will always be a few quiet ones, you take
special care to ask the quiet ones for their opinions, and in the end may learn
something important from them. The ones who do not have the strongest and
largest industries may also have important input for us with regards to the
Internet. This is why we need to continue with things like the ISOC fellowship
program, or make an extra effort to get smaller companies involved. We can't
change where work actually happens, but we should at least know who the "silent
ones" are in the Internet community (yet with knowledge) and make an extra
effort to get at least some involvement from them. Just think how much
real-world networking and Internet work actually is being done aroun!
d the world still in small companies, for instance, in addition to our large
companies.
Jari