On Tue, June 18, 2013 9:52 am, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > I am rather disappointed that there hasn't been any followup to the > diversity discussion that took place at the plenary. > > 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. Interesting. Can you explain what it is about the application layer that introduces gender and cultural issues? > 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. Internet stalking? Maybe you should call for a BoF to address the issue. I'm not sure what protocol can be developed, or modification to an existing protocol, that can address the stalking problem but I'm all ears! > 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. Some backgrounds and perspectives aren't all that helpful. Would you like my liddite father's perspective? How about the brother of a friend of mine who has been institutionalized and is quite insane? We need to get requirements from people who understand and will use our protocols. If those people are all the same background then oh well, but creating "diversity" by just adding people of the correct background will not make our standards better. Which says nothing about having more women in I* leadership positions. That may be great. Or it might not be. It depends on whether the people have clue or not. See, that's the thing. IETF needs people who have clue not people who are members of some protected group that has been declared to be underrepresented. > 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) Can you restate that as a problem? And also explain why it is a problem? > 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'. An opposing view is one that thinks this whole diversity issue is crap. Do you want to ensure that people who view the diversity issue as crap are included in the consensus being built? How many people who are currently on the diversity mailing list view the whole endeavor as crap? If it's zero (which is my prediction), then isn't that a problem with the diversity of the diversity group? Won't the output of that group suffer because they are all of the same mindset? > 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. Gosh. I feel so left out. I'm as old as EKR (and probably you) and have been involved in the IETF for about as long as he has yet you do not include me in your measure of diversity. Do you think that maybe you have a problem with measurement of the problem? > 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. The IETF is a weird lot. We are predominantly "type A" personalities. There are quite a few Asbergers cases and many more borderline functional Asbergers cases. There are probably also quite a bit of people who have OCD and maybe a mild case of Tourettes). So you have to explain how the general studies of diversity mean anything here. How does having a distribution of X:Y for some protected class increase the quality of an RFC? Dan.