Hi Melinda, I certainly agree that there are challenges in getting those who work for smaller companies to participate in the IETF (for known reasons). I believe the IETF, however, does better than other organizations that have expensive membership fees. The country/regional participation is an interesting aspect. If you try to figure out whether the IESG / IAB leadership is dominated from US participation then the question is what do you take as a basis for that analysis. You could, for example, take a look at Jari's draft/RFC statistics (see http://www.arkko.com/tools/allstats/countrydistr.html). The stats say that 50.69% of the authors come from the US. The IETF leadership has more than 50% of persons coming from the US. The question is, however, whether this is a good measurement to consider all the published documents as a basis for such an analysis. Also, if you look through the list you see Henning as the first person in that list. Henning is German. Mark Townsley as another example, can be found in the data about authors from France. Mark, like Henning, just moved to another country. Ciao Hannes On Mar 11, 2013, at 1:32 PM, Melinda Shore wrote: > On 3/11/2013 9:23 AM, Ted Hardie wrote: >> So, I said this once before on a previous thread, but I still believe that >> this analysis is wrong. From an organiational perspective, the aim of fostering >> diversity isn't "political correctness", it's enabling a larger pool >> of candidates. > > I tend to think of it as an effort to remove bias from the > system, which is probably consistent with the notion of > enabling more candidates. I think that right now there's > a far narrower set of perspectives being represented among > the I* than among the IETF participants. That's necessarily > the case when the I* is 30-odd people and there are several > thousand participants, but notably lacking among the > leadership are people who don't work for large manufacturers > and people who have first-hand knowledge of network > architectures and management practices in non-western > countries. I think that makes us weaker. > > Melinda > >