Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know

On Apr 19, 2013, at 10:31 PM, Ted Hardie 
<ted(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com<mailto:ted(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>>
 wrote:

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Dave Cridland 
<dave(_at_)cridland(_dot_)net<mailto:dave(_at_)cridland(_dot_)net>> wrote:

Nice post.

I wonder whether a better mechanism for drawing newcomers into the inner circle 
- which is what I think you're intent is here - would be to randomly select 
people to be involved in a short online meeting to discuss the draft, rather 
than review it in isolation.

It'd be a different kind of review, which adds value for us, I think, and would 
instantiate new human subnets which could be used to bootstrap other 
involvement.

I think that would be a useful additional approach (maybe have those randomly 
selected meet online before starting the reviews).  I do want to be sensitive, 
though, to the language barriers to some extent.  I used to recommend that 
folks interested in participating in a working group start by being a scribe; I 
realized eventually how hard that was for some participants whose native 
language was not English.  It's still useful for those for whom real-time 
capture of rapidly moving discussion is feasible, but we need something that 
allows folks time to reflect as well.


I tried that a while back. I found that it's really hard for a newbie to 
scribe. First, you have people running to the mike, and no idea who they are. I 
tried to position myself just in front of the mike so I could see the name 
tags, but that worked less than half of the times (there was another mike at 
the back). People saying their names helps very little, because it's very hard 
to catch even for English speakers. Add some different accent, and it becomes 
hopeless.

As chair, I try to pick the ones I know are familiar with those likely to come 
to the mike. Otherwise you end up with notes saying things like "someone at the 
mic says …"

Yoav