On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 1:28 AM, Eric Burger <eburger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Quite the contrary. I am interpreting a few of the 'diversity' posts as saying the IETF has fewer companies participating and much fewer smaller companies participating. And I am interpreting those posts as implying some nefarious plot on the part of large, Western, White-European-Male-Dominated companies to make it that way. I was just positing that the IETF might be reflective of the networking industry as a whole.
My thesis, not at all proven and one I am not married to, is there are fewer *companies* out there. With fewer companies, we should not be surprised there are fewer companies participating. On the big side, a ton of major players either merged or left the business. On the small side, a bunch of companies either got acquired or went bankrupt.
It's not a nefarious plot; all the meetings I've had with the rest of the Western White European Male Cabal haven't discussed the IETF at all, they're mostly on about the outrageous cost of fuel, these days. Quite honestly I'm thinking of leaving.
But I suspect the idea that there are fewer companies when the word "startup" seems to automatically imply something Internet related is wrong. There's plenty of small companies, but engagement in the IETF is either irrelevant - because the IETF has slipped lower down the stack - or too expensive - because when you have fewer than 10 people in your organization, losing one engineer for half a day a week of IETF activity represents 1%, whereas if you've a company of even "just" a thousand, losing an engineer to the IESG full time is an order of magnitude less. That's not considering the cost as an issue, which it undoubtedly is for a small company, especially those outside the US for whom the travel costs are higher.
I think the IETF leadership could solve the stack problem by being more proactive about encouraging standardization work to be brought into the IETF - I think having WebFinger here, for example, is very useful at making the IETF relevant to the startup audience, as it were, and there are several other of these small, high-stack protocols that would benefit from being worked on in the IETF and would benefit the IETF too.
Dave.