though.
My personal experience in the IETF is that it is really hard to gain some
'popularity' among the members of this variegated gallery of characters,
especially if you don't have any official sponsorship from one of the big
Internet companies. In case you were able to earn some credibility with a
couple of on-the-field successes, you would not be treated as a newcomer
anymore, but nonetheless as an outsider, a sort of strange entity wandering
around meeting corridors and looked at with some curiosity by the usual
gang of famous IETFfers. It is a matter of social attitudes. People are
strange when you're a stranger...and there is really little you can do
about that.
Cheers,
Simon
Il giorno 19/apr/2013, alle ore 20:13, Ted Hardie ha scritto:
Following a number of the threads on diversity and, in particular, on
whether the effort to get a better demographic view of participation will
lead to quotas, I have been increasingly uncomfortable with some of the
arguments which appear to have some presumptions about how diversity and
meritocracy relate.
To describe the issue, I'd like to start with a different situation and
then draw a parallel. The different situation I'd like to use is a startup
company experiencing growth. In my experience, startups that succeed tend
to have a very strong core group that comes together early on; they tackle
the hard work and develop a great degree of understanding of and trust in
each others' capabilities. As the company grows, it's very common for that
core group to continue to rely on each other whenever a difficult problem
arrives. That can manifest in those folks moving up to be the top of a
hierarchy and individually handling delegation; it can also manifest itself
in severe bottlenecks as the individuals remain critical resources to solve
an increasingly large number of problems.
In both cases, it's common for the individuals to pull in their own
networks of trusted folks as support. Another way of expressing this is
that a particular human network is the basis of an enterprise, and the
scaling of that human network tends to work by each one of the humans
pulling in additional folks from their personal networks whose skills are
personally known to them. The result of that is that the start-up *is* a
meritocracy as it grows (because the individuals are chosen based on their
abilities), but its diversity is initially limited to that of the personal
networks of those who end up in critical positions. As the company grows
and recruiting becomes more formalized, the overall make-up may become more
diverse, but key positions may remain less diverse as the human networks
remain in place or are renewed. Note that the scope of this diversity may
have nothing to do with race or gender, but may instead be about schools,
disciplines, or ages. (When it's schools, we even get to reuse the phrase
"old boy network" in its original sense).
In the IETF, things are slightly different, in that attendance and
participation are completely open (there's no hiring gate), but many of the
same human networks are in play. As a working group chair, when I stare
out at a sea of faces looking for a scribe, the chances of my asking
someone I know produces good minutes is much higher than my asking someone
whose work I don't know. But that also translates into the pool of
candidates being *only those people I know*, because that's the only pool
whose merits I have assessed. In other words, even though I'm selecting on
merit (good note takers), the way in which merit is determined (personal
knowledge) results in my not using the whole pool.
If there were an objective measure I could use instead, the WG's pool of
potential scribes would go up and the allocation likely would be fairer--if
I could say: "please tell me which potential minute taker (with a score of
70 or above) was tapped for the work least recently" and then tap that
individual, things get better for those who are otherwise tapped too often.
Note again that the increased diversity in that pool may have nothing to
do with race or gender or even age, but it might instead be in technical
interest area (since I came from APPs into RAI, my background is focused in
certain areas).
The individual impact of my limited human networks may be small (I hope
so, anyway); in the best case, the limitations of mine would be overcome by
the scope of my co-chairs' and ADs'. But it can easily be a
self-reinforcing instead; if all the chairs come from the same backgrounds,
they may know and trust the same people. Those people likely are being
selected for merit--but not from the total available pool.
As folks worry about quotas and its impact on quality, I think we must
recognize that the effort to promote based on merit alone is subject to the
limits by which merits are assessed. The more human those are, the higher
the likelihood that network limitations or cognitive bias will have an
impact on our best use of the volunteers we have or could attack.
So, given this very human problem, what can we do? Suresh and I
happened to be at a different SDO meeting yesterday, and we sat down
briefly and discussed this. Two things emerged as possible concrete
actions from that brainstorming, but they both boil down to this:
institutionalize methods for getting technical input from newcomers/less
well-known participants, so that technical input can be basis of
assessments. In other words, give those outside the human networks an
institutional method for being part of the technical community. That should
align with chairs' chronic need to find technical energy to assess and
complete work.
The first suggestion is a "Newcomer's directorate". After an individual
starts participating in the IETF, either by attending a meeting or joining
a mailing list, offer them the opportunity to become part of a review team.
That review team would have templates (as does AppsDir, the GenArt team,
and others) and example reviews to guide the new participant. The
newcomers would be assigned last call reviews that would then be sent to
the relevant working group chairs and ADs for review. Those who produced
good work would then be known to others relatively quickly. At the end of
their "newcomer" period they might transition to a relevant directorate
based in an Area.
The second suggestion is a simple tool that at WG call time (be it last
call or call for adoption) randomly selects a set number of participants
from the mailing list, and then asks for a review or commentary. So 5
folks off the mailing list are directly asked for their opinion, without
regard to preconceived notions of the chairs about who would be a good
reviewer. If someone declines, the tool would select a new random person
to fill out. The working group as a whole thus gets a chance to understand
someone's technical viewpoint, without that person having to fit within one
of the established human networks.
There are other methods that may well be better than the two Suresh and
I discussed, but I put these forward as a potentially concrete step that
may help those struggling with this to understand that the end result of
this need not be quotas. It should be a better environment for all of our
volunteers.
best regards,
Ted Hardie
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Simon Pietro Romano
Universita' di Napoli Federico II
Computer Engineering Department
Phone: +39 081 7683823 -- Fax: +39 081 7683816
e-mail:
spromano(_at_)unina(_dot_)it
<<Molti mi dicono che lo scoraggiamento Ë l'alibi degli
idioti. Ci rifletto un istante; e mi scoraggio>>.
Magritte.
oooO
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