Hi John,
I agree and I will add, that What makes that participant continue to
volunteer, or even witness/read the ietf work process? Making someone
interested to do something freely is not an easy task. The difficulty
is how to make that individual participate with value, he/she may need
help to notice that *IETF needs* their regional-participation.
Example, I got once a response that IETF or WG chair's jobs are not to
educate others, but who said that IETF is better educated or that WG
chairs are better educated than others. It always depends on the
relativity of education with the region needs, not only eduaction
related to the Internet technology.
I think we *need* in IETF to gain all best educated people of
world-regions into IETF (volunteering), so that we make the Internet
better for the WORLD, because technology SHOULD follow the
community-regional *needs*. Not that we need to gain best
standard/technology experts to make all regions follow the
technology-product requirements, because will may never be *used* that
way :-)
Comments below,
AB
On 5/27/13, John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
I think this is a summary of the issues people have mentioned that
discourage participation from LDCs, in rough order of importance.
* People aren't aware the IETF exists, or what it does, or that it has
an open participation model
Also IMHO, the IETF is not aware of existance of Internet
community-regional *needs* for their better Internet technology
future,
* People don't read and write English well enough to be comfortable
participating
That is not an issue, well educated people around the world know
english reasonably, but the problem is that many of current IETF
participants like to read correct english, hope they change to adapt
to the World's English.
* People are unaccustomed to and perhaps uncomfortable expressing
overt disagreement
That is true, but mostly Chairs and editors are responsible to make
that continue or stop.
* People don't think they have anything to contribute to an organization
that is mostly people from rich countries
This point is important, please read my addition above.
* People don't have adequate Internet access for mail, or to use the
remote participation tools
Yes that is true, but also we need people like old participants, or
98% of participants to get use to participating remotely at IETF
meetings. I don't want to see complains on journey expenses of money
but of spending-time is ok :Z
I have to say that I don't see one or two meetings in South America
addressing any of these. Given that the incremental cost to the
participants, compared to meeting in North America, would likely be on
the order of a million dollars, it seems to me very likely that there
are better ways to spend the money.
I don't care how much money spent, we SHOULD focus on how much time
gained by IETF and how much volunteer-time spent for IETF. Attendance
can spend the same time remotely, the World is well connected now,
For example, if language and net access is a problem, it might be
interesting to set up a remote participation center in B.A. during one
of the North American meetings (it's one time zone off from Toronto)
with screens and cameras, paid interpreters, and a few volunteers to
help explain what's going on.
I think the problem is contribution access to IETF. We need centers to
increase access to documents-produced per regions, centers to increase
participants per region, centers to increase remote users per regions,
etc.
R's,
John