I am rather disappointed that there hasn't been any followup to the
diversity discussion that took place at the plenary.
I do applications and I do security and so having a diverse range of input
is critical if the final product is going to be useful. There are no gender
or cultural issues in packet routing that I am aware of. But once we get to
the application layer they become central.
We seem to have interminable discussions about how to help some
hypothetical dissident in (pick your authoritarian state). But I can't
remember the last time we discussed Internet stalking which has been an
issue women have been complaining about since I started getting involved in
IETF. This is just one security issues that has a big gender bias and it is
a problem that I think can be usefully addressed in an open consensus
seeking organization.
It does not take 100 people to write a specification but it does take a
large number of people to adequately gather requirements. Taking
requirements from 100 people from almost the same background and
perspective is not very productive. I am aware that I have a limited
personal perspective which is why I actively seek out other perspectives.
At the plenary I pointed out that there have been women involved in IETF
ever since I started in IETF over 20 years ago now. Yet we have an IAB and
an IESG with only one female member who is not ex-officio (according to
their Web sites)
That situation should be something that has the IETF management worried but
I can't see much sign of that. The IETF is unlikely to die but it can lose
influence beyond the IP and DNS core. Sooner or later someone is going to
work out how to establish an applications standards process that is gender
and culture inclusive. And we know from experience that in our environment
there can be a remarkably small time between the idea and establishing an
institution.
Minecraft was launched in 2011 and they had 4,500 people at their first
international conference that year, they are now about to have their third.
So they went from having nothing to having a larger participant community
than the IETF in a matter of months.
The IETF is a community known for valuing consensus rather than seeking
diverse views. I see a real risk that the consensus being built here is a
false consensus built by excluding opposing views rather than a real
consensus built on reconciling them. Bringing opposing views to this forum
is invariably a thankless task. The assumption is that if you can't hack it
here well that is your fault and your problem. Case in point, each time I
get something wrong in RFC2HTML and I get the error message 'You Lose', my
natural response is 'why the heck am I bothering wasting my time here'.
I do not think that gender is the only diversity problem in IETF but it is
one that can be measured and the IETF is conspicuously failing. We also
have a rather severe age problem, twenty years ago EKR and myself were
among the youngest participants in most discussions and setting aside the
grad students the same is usually true today.
The perspective is going to need to change. Rather than looking for ways to
encourage a few token women to work their way up through the existing
selection regime we need to look at what sort of selection and
participation and representation structures will encourage diversity.
--
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