On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 01:55:50PM -0300, Fernando Gont wrote: > On 28/7/20 12:54, Nico Williams wrote: > [....] > > > (3) We are an international community with aspirations to be > > > even more so. That may imply that a term or acronym that is > > > neutral or otherwise acceptable in English may be offensive, > > > oppressive, or exclusionary when translated or transliterated > > > into another language. We should probably be aware of that too. > > > > There are limits to how sensitive we can be to issues we're not aware > > of. I.e., we depend on reviewers to tell us about the issues they are > > aware of. Which brings us back to your point about banned word lists > > not possibly being sufficient. > > Part of the issue is, I guess, that much needs to be second-guessed, because > virtually all the communities that would find the aforementioned language to > be offensive are under-represented here (if at all represented). Because we are such an international community, but also a very very small and unrepresentative subset of the world's population, we're bound to have under-represented communities. There are a few things that are particularly important when dealing with such a situation: - empathy - openness - intent Intent, of course, is typically not-of-interest to many in these debates for some reason. But it is important. If one unintentionally gives offense and their lack of intent is insufficient to obtain forgiveness, then we might as well stop having a functioning society. I.e., we can learn. > Maybe if one were to try to address the underlying problem (inclusiveness), > any issues related to language would be solved as a side-effect? We're a very specialized, *self-selected* group. No one ever said to me "hey, you'd bring diversity to the IETF, so your next assignment is to participate there". Nor is that a recipe for the further success of the IETF. Many of us are not sponsored in any way by employers. When I was at Sun my IETF participation was never a principal aspect of my job, and I participated entirely of my own initiative. Ditto my employer previous to Sun. Ditto all my employment since. I believe this is true for most IETF participants. Self-selection simply *cannot* produce uniform diversity. For that matter, how could a group of 1,000 to 2,000 people, no matter how they be selected, possibly be reasonably representative of the world's population?? If you want proportional representation of the world in the IETF's participant population, you'd have to make the IETF an expensive membership organization with participant ethnic/racial/ gender/etc. quotas to be met by member organization employers who have the kind of resources to make that happen (as if rich high-tech employers' employees are themselves representative of the world!). That's not in the cards, so we'll have to make do with the diversity that we have. Perhaps you mean that we have barriers to entrance that produce an exclusive club. However, of all the SDOs, the IETF is by far the most accessible by any and all measures: ease of access (mailing lists, meetecho, etc.), cost ($0 for mailing list participation, which is the only participation that is required to get RFCs published, i.e., work done), discrimination (our rules for selecting a NomCom and I* leadership are explicitly non-discriminatory using any plausible protected classes). All other SDOs are far far more costly and less accessible at the very least: ISO and member nation SDOs, the ITU-T, the UC, IEEE, OASIS, etc -- all expensive membership organizations and inaccessible to non-members. We've yet to hear a plausible proposal for increasing diversity at the IETF. In the meantime we have to operate with who we are. Decrying our lack of diversity will not help us. Instead, we need (and have!) mechanisms for identifying use of offensive language and correcting it prior to publication -- mechanisms that work as well as can be expected given an educated, empathetic, open-minded, self-selected, -yes, fairly diverse considering- membership. We have such a mechanism, and it is the entirety of our publication proces, with its many opportunities for review. Nico --
