On 19/06/13 22:56, Yoav Nir wrote:
On Jun 19, 2013, at 6:26 PM, Brian Haberman br...@innovationslab.net wrote:
To help facilitate the mentoring aspect, there will be a call soon for
volunteers to act as mentors for newcomers (starting with IETF 87). Once the
web page for the mentoring program with all the information is up, you should
be seeing a call for mentors.
We hope that this type of program will aid in assisting newer members of the
IETF community become more involved and productive in our activities.
This may be helpful in getting first-time attendees to stay on with the IETF.
That is a laudable goal in itself, but I'm not sure if it will help diversity.
Just bringing in new white male employees of US router companies will not
increase diversity. It might work if the pool of newcomers is considerably more
diverse than the pool of veterans, but having been in the last two
meet-and-greets, I see a lot of the same, except that the newcomer group has
more people from China. I see few women, hardly any Africans (from Africa or
the US), and not a lot of company names I recognize as operators.
There is one observation puzzled me, and it will be good to hear from
the community, sort of like 'request for comments'. Part of it is based
on the previous IETF panel discussions plus all sorts of mails from ietf
related lists.
By following our diversity discussions so far, the term white male
seems to be cited rather frequently and most of time with some kind of
emotions attached to it, e.g. dominant, power, monopoly etc. To be
honest, I do have a mixed feeling when encountering such KEY WORD in a
public speech or along the lines of mail. That feeling resembles very
much when I heard Chinese being associated with minority, passive,
reserved or even, communist ...
I understand the term black is not friendly to mention in US, but
seriously, is the other term WHITE now being so freely used as such,
especially in IETF, not even a slight concern? Just because the
tolerance level among the white male group is already so high that no
one really cares about it anymore? or just because currently IETF
engineers tagged with white male background are found in most
management/leadership slots so that it is easier to draw some kind of
hatred feeling or recognition from the under-present group who have
being pressed for so long? Sometimes it is quite hard to distinguish the
intention of such, being considerate and thoughtful for the healthy
development of our community, or just to fit in certain group's craving
for the taste of the throne (here I don't target at any specific person,
seriously)
One visible flaw is that to wire the white male up against diversity
in IETF is largely irrelevant to the topic itself. This is in large a
stereotype. Like currently there are so many Chinese living
permanently/grow up in America, Europe and Asia. The white male are
similarly not just from or living/working in the US, there are so many I
know actually are living outside, oh well, definitely covering EU, and
in many Asian areas, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and in major Chinese
cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. They definitely can understand and
appreciate the culture differences in terms of working and
communications, which are most relevant to the IETF functionality.
The more relevant thing here is that what do we actually want? Would it
be that we need more diverse participation from the globe which in the
end maximize the output and impact of IETF? Right now our white male
engineers are put on the front line to be 'scrutinized' under the
'diversity' microscope, what if a couple years later, the trend shifts
to Asians? or Latin America or Australians or Africans. Sorry, I really
try to avoid the skin color or gender here, because I personally believe
it is essentially off the topic of the whole IETF diversity thing we
shall focus on.
As the title hinted, really hope the goal of this diversity movement
does not end up into against or wiping out white male from IETF, just
because people 'firmly' believe they are the ones controlling the whole
scene and resources, and won't let it go unless a revolution is called
upon (btw, does it sound similar to many others demanding a radical
revolution to the existing Chinese dominant 'group'? :)
Well, if the dominant ones later being replaced by other groups, do we
need to revamp again? What will be the end?
Thanks, particularly for tolerating such long mail,
Aaron
