Re: Diversity of IETF Leadership

[Will Slack <falsehood911@xxxxxxxxx>]

I see some rough consensus that more diversity/a wider spectrum of viewpoints (across various metrics) in various ISTF groups would be helpful, with support for Arturo's language:

The problem is to bring new people (younger people, women, from more

countries, different languages, etc.) to write RFCs, to participate/be

interested in the IETF and how we involve/prepare these people to become

our leaders and not just participants.

This is a goal that everyone can help carry out, and there's no reason not to start working individually at this now - especially if you are a company that understands the IETF's work. However, the original message raised two other points:

    - Lack of diversity in our leadership becomes a self-perpetuating

      problem, because people who are not represented in the IETF

      leadership are less likely to dedicate their time and effort to

      the IETF.

    - The lack of diversity in the IETF leadership undermines our

      credibility and challenges our legitimacy as an International

      Standards Development Organization.

It's telling that the third point wasn't mentioned by anyone else, as far as I saw - in fact, the words "credibility" and "legitimacy" have not appeared in this thread since it's inception. The "governance of the internet" has been an recent topic of international discussion (as far as I can see as a news consumer), and this group's leadership composition may be a relevant aspect of that discussion. It makes Arturo's point even more compelling.

-Will

PS:

The school studies were done with random (e.g. public school) and non-self-selected (e.g. parent selected) groups as the subjects.  AFAIK the IETF is pretty much a completely self-selected group of people and most especially the women are self-selected - and I wouldn't consider that the school study applies much given those difference.  I mentioned it because its conclusion - that women and men are "smarter" when separate (yup - paraphrasing) seems to be at odds with the other mentioned conclusion that "groups are smarter the more women in them".

In fact, the random nature of the participants is the reason we can generalize studies across broad populations. The standard you set would render pretty much any study applicably irrelevant unless it was made of IETF participants.

But I think that entire discussion leads us astray - this is not a listserve of social scientists, and these issues and their citations are charged in various ways across the world, along with ways we can define diversity. We all also carry some of our own viewpoints into these discussions; for example, I would initially treat a less diverse slate of chosen leaders from a more diverse pool of candidates as suspect. I would be happy to engage anyone 1-on-1 if they have further questions about this area (or point #2) from my own experience as a student on several hiring and governance committees with university administrators, dealing with the exact issues raised on this thread, or as a young person that joined up thanks to the open membership policies and legitimacy discussed elsewhere.