On 6/18/13, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hal...@gmail.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
