I am rather disappointed that there hasn't been any followup to the diversity discussion that took place at the plenary.
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Website: http://hallambaker.com/
I do applications and I do security and so having a diverse range of input is critical if the final product is going to be useful. There are no gender or cultural issues in packet routing that I am aware of. But once we get to the application layer they become central.
We seem to have interminable discussions about how to help some hypothetical dissident in (pick your authoritarian state). But I can't remember the last time we discussed Internet stalking which has been an issue women have been complaining about since I started getting involved in IETF. This is just one security issues that has a big gender bias and it is a problem that I think can be usefully addressed in an open consensus seeking organization.
It does not take 100 people to write a specification but it does take a large number of people to adequately gather requirements. Taking requirements from 100 people from almost the same background and perspective is not very productive. I am aware that I have a limited personal perspective which is why I actively seek out other perspectives.
At the plenary I pointed out that there have been women involved in IETF ever since I started in IETF over 20 years ago now. Yet we have an IAB and an IESG with only one female member who is not ex-officio (according to their Web sites)
That situation should be something that has the IETF management worried but I can't see much sign of that. The IETF is unlikely to die but it can lose influence beyond the IP and DNS core. Sooner or later someone is going to work out how to establish an applications standards process that is gender and culture inclusive. And we know from experience that in our environment there can be a remarkably small time between the idea and establishing an institution.
Minecraft was launched in 2011 and they had 4,500 people at their first international conference that year, they are now about to have their third. So they went from having nothing to having a larger participant community than the IETF in a matter of months.
The IETF is a community known for valuing consensus rather than seeking diverse views. I see a real risk that the consensus being built here is a false consensus built by excluding opposing views rather than a real consensus built on reconciling them. Bringing opposing views to this forum is invariably a thankless task. The assumption is that if you can't hack it here well that is your fault and your problem. Case in point, each time I get something wrong in RFC2HTML and I get the error message 'You Lose', my natural response is 'why the heck am I bothering wasting my time here'.
I do not think that gender is the only diversity problem in IETF but it is one that can be measured and the IETF is conspicuously failing. We also have a rather severe age problem, twenty years ago EKR and myself were among the youngest participants in most discussions and setting aside the grad students the same is usually true today.
The perspective is going to need to change. Rather than looking for ways to encourage a few token women to work their way up through the existing selection regime we need to look at what sort of selection and participation and representation structures will encourage diversity.
Website: http://hallambaker.com/