Re: IETF Diversity

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On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 1:36 AM, Dan Harkins <dharkins@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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?

Internationalization is not an issue for IPv6 or you are doing it really wrong. If you get to the apps layer it becomes very important.

The IP layer does not interface to people, the apps layer does.


  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!

The issue is not necessarily lets build a protocol to stop stalking.

Rather it is a question of having that context in mind when we are discussing privacy issues. Right now the only contexts we seem to consider privacy in are 'how does a dissident stop the government seeing what they are talking about to others' and 'how do we stop a government catching said dissident'.

Since the answers to both involve steganography, I don't see an open venue as a useful place to engage in such work. But it gets raised as it is the sort of threat men can relate to. Meanwhile rather more common threats that we can deal with are ignored.

It is a matter of priorities. 

> 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?


It demonstrates that the IETF diversity problem is not due to a lack of qualified people. There are other factors at work.

> 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?

My point was that there cohort ten years younger than ourselves is very thin. The cohort ten years younger than that mostly grad students who we seem to be unable to persuade to continue participating after they hand in their thesis.


--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

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