On 19/06/13 22:56, Yoav Nir wrote:
On Jun 19, 2013, at 6:26 PM, Brian Haberman <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
To help facilitate the mentoring aspect, there will be a call soon for volunteers to act as mentors for newcomers (starting with IETF 87). Once the web page for the mentoring program with all the information is up, you should be seeing a call for mentors.
We hope that this type of program will aid in assisting newer members of the IETF community become more involved and productive in our activities.
This may be helpful in getting first-time attendees to stay on with the IETF. That is a laudable goal in itself, but I'm not sure if it will help diversity. Just bringing in new white male employees of US router companies will not increase diversity. It might work if the pool of newcomers is considerably more diverse than the pool of veterans, but having been in the last two meet-and-greets, I see a lot of the same, except that the newcomer group has more people from China. I see few women, hardly any Africans (from Africa or the US), and not a lot of company names I recognize as operators.
So unless we find a way to get a more diverse group to the meetings, such a mentoring program will only help us get some new blood - same as the old blood, but new.
That sounds similar to "new bottles but still filled with the old type
wine" - long lasting old Chinese saying :)
Personally speaking, mentoring is a viable one to start with, although
some colleagues told me it has been here for quite a while.. Anyway, as
we still got several unsolved questions, such as what Doug mentioned,
"until we understand what WE are dealing with (as opposed to what other
organizations are dealing with) we're not going to make any actual
progress.", unless our community come up with better ones soon
addressing those, diversity won't make to IETF in a couple months.
Thanks for Brian and folks taking their time to setup the whole thing.