Re: Improving the ISOC Fellowship programme to attract people from under

Hi,

On Oct 11, 2013, at 14:43, Jari Arkko <jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> 
wrote:
> I do have a question for Lars though. What are your opinions on this? (You 
> said that there is no consensus, but I'd like to hear also your thoughts.)
so one key question is what influence the IETF actually has on an ISOC program. 
We can certainly state our wishes, but my belief is that it's ISOC's program in 
the end, and they can basically chose to run it as they see fit. That doesn't 
come out in the draft at all.

Another issue I have with the the draft is written with the implied 
understanding that the program should fund the repeated attendance of residents 
of under-represented regions who are actively participating in some sort of 
way. It's not clear to me that this is really what would be best in terms of 
increasing organizational diversity over time. I wouldn't want to fund the same 
people over and over; I'd much rather bring in new people all the time in the 
hopes of spreading the word about the IETF widely and hoping that some folks 
will end up in roles where they can occasionally attend on their own dime. I'd 
like to be able to bring in other under-represented groups (students, 
academics, women, etc.) We can certainly have a discussion about what is best; 
my point is that the draft has already decided that one approach is the way to 
go.

I also have a few issues with the suggestions it makes:

Section 4.1 requires that an applicant needs to already have been a participant 
in the IETF. That seems excessive. For returning fellows, some sort of 
engagement in the IETF after a while would be nice, but I can see valid cases 
for supporting someone's repeated attendance who isn't contributing in a very 
visible role. Also, I question the possibility to quantify and compare 
someone's impact of IETF involvement. And again, there are others than 
"resident of a country in an under-represented region" who we might want to 
bring in, and we probably don't need to fund the attendance of employees of 
large vendors who happen to be residents of under-represented regions.

The evaluation panel in Section 4.2 is therefore also problematic. And I 
wouldn't want to blindly "prioritize people who have been contributing over 
time to real IETF work" - we need to keep the flexibility of bringing in 
someone new who has high potential even if it means that someone who has been 
funded to attend in the past isn't going to be covered.

But my main issue is that the draft sounds like its trying to take over and 
redefine an ISOC program, which I don't think the IETF can or should do. The 
ISOC program has a purpose, a history and at least from my perspective is 
working pretty well with the budget it has available. I'm not sure we can 
actually improve it much.

Lars

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