Hi Julien,
At 06:34 AM 28-01-2021, Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia - FR/Paris-Saclay) wrote:
Generally agree with Fernando, but I would like to focus on a
different take : there is a danger to focus on "diversity" for its
own sake, and people tend to hang their particular view of diversity
there (race, gender, country, religion, sexual orientation...).
Picking the "right" type of diversity will always create some form
of bias, there will always be unhappy people and it's not clear we
can find a "satisfactory" (set of) axis.
The following is from the IETF web site: "IETF standards are built on
the combined engineering judgement of participants, including
individuals from academia and network operators, router vendors and
open source projects". There are nomination committee appointments
to entities where non-engineering expertise is sought, e.g. the IETF
Administration LLC. If the appointments, viewed as a whole, are
undiverse, the organization would not look international. I doubt
that it would be possible to devise criteria which would be
satisfactory to everyone. It is usually left to the members of the
nomination committee to decide whether to consider that aspect in
making their selections/appointments.
I took a quick look at the current composition of the LLC. A
majority of its directors are from one region. Are there people with
the relevant expertise from other regions interested in volunteering
for that position? Why didn't they apply for the position?
The above is also applicable for Area Directors.
The previous diversity effort was focused on the male/female
ratio. It is unlikely that the outsourced effort to increase
regional diversity was successful given the nomination committee
appointments. Diversity might be a difficult problem to address. It
is better to give up on addressing the diversity issue(s) instead of
seeing meaningless statements from the IESG about it.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
