On Tue, June 18, 2013 9:52 am, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
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.
Interesting. Can you explain what it is about the application layer
that introduces gender and cultural issues?
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.
Internet stalking? Maybe you should call for a BoF to address the issue.
I'm not sure what protocol can be developed, or modification to an existing
protocol, that can address the stalking problem but I'm all ears!
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.
Some backgrounds and perspectives aren't all that helpful. Would you
like my liddite father's perspective? How about the brother of a friend
of mine who has been institutionalized and is quite insane? We need to
get requirements from people who understand and will use our protocols.
If those people are all the same background then oh well, but creating
"diversity" by just adding people of the correct background will not make
our standards better.
Which says nothing about having more women in I* leadership positions.
That may be great. Or it might not be. It depends on whether the people
have clue or not.
See, that's the thing. IETF needs people who have clue not people who
are members of some protected group that has been declared to be
underrepresented.
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)
Can you restate that as a problem? And also explain why it is a problem?
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'.
An opposing view is one that thinks this whole diversity issue is crap.
Do you want to ensure that people who view the diversity issue as crap are
included in the consensus being built? How many people who are currently
on the diversity mailing list view the whole endeavor as crap? If it's zero
(which is my prediction), then isn't that a problem with the diversity of the
diversity group? Won't the output of that group suffer because they are
all of the same mindset?
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.
Gosh. I feel so left out. I'm as old as EKR (and probably you) and have
been
involved in the IETF for about as long as he has yet you do not include me in
your measure of diversity. Do you think that maybe you have a problem with
measurement of the problem?
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.
The IETF is a weird lot. We are predominantly "type A" personalities. There
are quite a few Asbergers cases and many more borderline functional
Asbergers cases. There are probably also quite a bit of people who have
OCD and maybe a mild case of Tourettes). So you have to explain how the
general studies of diversity mean anything here. How does having a
distribution of X:Y for some protected class increase the quality of an RFC?
Dan.