ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: IETF Diversity

2013-06-18 13:04:39
On 6/18/13, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
I am rather disappointed that there hasn't been any followup to the
diversity discussion that took place at the plenary.


I thought there are some people following/working this up, and made
some progress. However, I agree that I seen no progress
written/reported to us,

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.

I agree that at that layer you will face the community.


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.

I mentioned similar idea of that before, and I agree IETF needs
diversity to progress.


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.

I suggested also that we need more women in management, so I support
that, however, majority men may not want that, so what can we do!!!!

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.

It is good if IETF realise that it can loose, so it will work harder.
The IETF is mostly doing its meetings in North America so its culture
is closer to North America culture.


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.

I think that is good news, and that IETF should realise how did that
happen, and realise what is wrong in IETF. I suggested before that
IETF encourages participants, and gave many responses but still I was
feeling ignored.


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.

I already mentioned that before, I found out that many say we want
consensus when they don't have good engineering reason, and when there
is no consensus they go back to technical reasons.

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'.

We waste time only if management don't listen to the
minorities/diversed of the community.


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.

I agree,



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.


I think it is very easy to encourage people, and very easy to
discourage people, the difficult part is to maintain people encouraged
and liking to continue participating in the IETF. Many people in life
hate CHANGE, so that is another difficulty, the IETF should get use to
CHANGE.


Thanks for your input it makes a greater impact than my inputs maybe
because my english.

AB

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>