I'd agree to the more general statement that people from large commercial organisations are dominating, and I'd argue that this is due to the cost (in time and finanically) of doing reasonably high level IETF work. This also restricts the available pool, and furthermore means our leadership is at most as diverse as those large commercial organisations.
This means that we're not only locking ourselves out of having comparatively pure academics in leadership positions, but also locking ourselves out of the kinds of independent web developers doing much of the practical protocol work these days, which in turn means that the IETF influences that work less than it might, or indeed should.
On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
One aspect of IETF leadership diversity that seems to have considerably decreased over the years that I've been working with IETF is the number of people from academic/research relative to the number of people from the commercial sector. I believe that this has been extremely harmful to IETF.
Keith