> - Each of the confirming bodies (the ISOC Board for the IAB, the > IAB for the IESG, and the IESG for the IAOC) could make a > public statement at the beginning of each year's nominations > process that they will not confirm a slate unless it > contributes to increased diversity within the IETF leadership, > or it is accompanied by a detailed explanation of what > steps were taken to select a more diverse slate and why it was > not possible to do so. That sounds a lot like quotas. Let's not go there. It would be entirely reasonable to tell future nomcoms that increased diversity (for some definition of diversity) is one of their goals and expect them to do their job in good faith, as nomcoms have consistently done. A large point that you've only touched on is that we can't create diversity by fiat. While it is admirable in some ways that many of the people active in the IETF now are the same people who were active in the IETF and its predecessors 20 or 30 years ago, it's also kind of scary, since nobody is immortal (although in a few cases it may seem that way.) In some senses the IETF is phenomenally open, since anyone with an e-mail address can sign up for the mailing lists and join the fun, but in other ways it's really difficult to break in, partly because the topics can be complex and subtle, partly because of a (not wholly unreasonable) impatience with people who out of ignorance or otherwise want to reopen ancient arguments, or who imagine that the way to define a standard is to create a kitchen sink of everyone's favorite featurettes. (No, it's not better to support both XML and JSON than just one of them.) These are reasonably straightforward to deal with, largely by pointing people at list archives, the Tao, and other things we've written over the years. What concerns me more is that people who could contribute don't. Part of that is because some parts of the IETF have become ossified, which is an issue I don't want to address here, but a lot of it is that people still just don't know who we are. The IRTF's newish ANRP looks like a good model, it picks promising students who probably wouldn't pay any attention to us, and waves a small prize and a junket to an IETF meeting at them. The quality of the papers has been very good, but equally important, they go back home and tell their friends about their favorable experience at the IETF/IRTF. There's only so many prizes we can hand out, but I think it's worth thinking about what other modest inducements we might come up with to get people who would be good IETFers to give us a look. R's, John