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RE: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

2013-04-18 11:09:46
Age, IQ, & shoe size?  (Ideally, they should be equal.)

Irrespectively Yours,

John


-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org 
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of
Eliot Lear
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2013 9:01 AM
To: Dan Harkins
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

Self inflicted confusion.  Please see below:

On 4/18/13 5:17 PM, Dan Harkins wrote:
  Hi Eliot,

On Wed, April 17, 2013 12:48 pm, Eliot Lear wrote:
Pardon me, but that makes no sense. Asking about the gender make-up
of
those who elect to register for a future meeting is going to tell us
little about who we are. It will be a snapshot in time and it will
not
representative of "who we are" because we are more than just the
people who register to go to any particular meeting.

And let's stop there.  The point of my originally muddled note was that
we shouldn't just ask about gender.  For that I apologize.  Also, I
wouldn't do this just one time.
  The facts are already not in dispute. The I* leadership is
predominantly white and male. The fallacy works like this:

We don't have facts in evidence, and as I wrote above, I'm not even
sure we know which facts we need.  I can say that gender is probably
one, country of residence is something we have, age is something we
don't ask, but we do ask how many meetings you've been to.  We don't
ask why you're at the IETF and we don't ask which groups are important
to you.
We don't ask whether you plan to attend other IETFs and we don't ask
anyone who has attended an IETF but isn't back, why they didn't show.
We don't ask questions about the experience, in terms of how people are
able to find their way through the process.  There are many questions
we don't ask.  Now granted, some of this is more than who we are, but
also how easy are we to work with.  How does language and location play
into this?

Personally I'd love to survey people going to OTHER standards
organizations and find out why they chose those other organizations to
pursue work, but then I'm not footing the bill for all of this, so...

This is not just about one attribute.  You're ALMOST right in that a
lot of us know each other.  Perhaps that's even a problem, in that
others can't break in.

Much of this is what I would expect the diversity team to explore.

Eliot


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