Thanks for raising this. I believe an IETF with more diverse participation and leadership would be a stronger IETF. When we have more diverse experiences and viewpoints, our results will be better and more generally applicable. Participants from different places, cultures, men, women, and people in different situations. One of the challenges that I have identified as I am taking the IETF chair task is to make the IETF even more international and more diverse. I would be very happy to create a design team to come up with analysis of the situation and recommendations for actions that we can take. The first thing that I plan to do is to find a leader or two for the design team. If you think you would be willing to lead this effort, please send me e-mail. I would also like to make a couple of other observations. First, even if there is plenty of work to do in this area, we should also recognise how much has already happened, and be proud of that progress. IETF documents have authors from roughly sixty different countries from six continents. On some areas we've witnessed a tremendously positive development. But those developments take time. Take China, for example. Participation has gone from 2% to 11% in a couple of years. At the same time, we've seen Chinese participants start from participation and I-D submission and progress to succeeding in publishing RFCs, and becoming a part of the leadership. For instance, in the Internet Area we have two WG chairs from China, and now in March Xing Li has become an IAB member. A while ago Russ moved the Atlanta meeting to IETF-85 to reduce the effects of visa trouble that we kept having in US meetings. We keep training new people for working group chair positions and editors, and in general try to get new participants, companies, and countries involved. ISOC has a program to bring in more participants from new areas of the world, and I look forward to meeting some of them this week. Please chat with the newcomers and get them involved in your IETF work, or help them with the issues they have in the Internet! I think all this is great. But also a trend that needs to continue. And repeated for others. For instance, what does it take to get South American or African participation up in the same manner as China? While we have some participants from those areas, the numbers are very, very low. As an aside, the IAOC is investigating the possibility of a meeting in South America and we are also looking at running a live connection of the Berlin meeting to another continent to attract additional participants. Obviously, much more needs to be done to make the significant change that is needed. Also, I think we want to continue with a model where choices for picking people for IETF roles is still done on the basis of picking the best person for the job. I think we should take things like gender and geographical location as inputs to those choices. Just like we already do with many other things, such as specific protocol competence spread, technical/management/governance/communications competence, operator/vendor background, ability to engage with the user and business communities, and so on. I only have personal experience about selecting working group chairs and document editors. But I think we already do take all of these factors into account at least in some cases, but further emphasis on this would be good. I'm sure everyone else who is making personnel decisions in the IETF is also quite aware of the need to support diversity. Of course, we do not always get to make the choices we would like. Sometimes we lack the candidates that we think we need. Sometimes we have a great candidate for some task, but for a business reason they do not have the support to take a full-time leadership position. Sometimes the random appearance of a new business in some part of the world drives the influx of new people from that region. We are not in full control of these external effects. Finally, I think we need to take diversity in the broadest sense. It should include at least the following aspects: gender, geographical location, culture, age, and type of background or business where you work in. For instance, I think the IETF would benefit greatly from getting more younger generation participants, and we should work hard to attract them and topics that interest them. And I do not think we can just focus on the leadership. The basis for increased diversity in the leadership is increased diversity in IETF participation in general. In short - this is very important and deserves further work. That work will be hard, it is about training new people and attracting new participants and convincing new people about taking on leadership positions. But I am sure we will make a lot of progress on this, and the design team would be important in helping the leadership understand what actions we can take. So thanks again for making the suggestion. Jari Arkko