Hi Hector, On 7/20/13 11:47 AM, Hector Santos wrote:
Overall, I think the IETF has a marketing problem addressing its #1 customer base - electronic participants.
By this term, I assume (based on later text) you mean remote participants...
I was somewhat hoping to see more done in the mentor area of assisting electronic participants. Of coarse, this sort of electronic mentoring it could include an end goal to get folks more involved with the IETF directly, i.e. go to meetings, become leaders, etc, but overall assist with protocol standards development.
Since this is the first time we have tried to deploy a mentoring program, we wanted to limit the scope to keep things manageable. If the mentoring program "succeeds" in Berlin, we will examine ways of expanding it.
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Maybe I'm off-base, but it just seems the mentoring efforts is targeted at attracting full time IETF members, future leaders, etc and not just the specific technical person who might be just interested in various protocols of interest and no more. Our products are internet based and hence has dozens of protocols implemented. I'm here really just to keep on top of them, assist with improvements, and if need be try to get an I-D written if only to prove a point or get an idea out there for consideration and creative synergism. Not interested in become an IETF full time attendee nor "leader" per se.
Not at all. The people we are targeting are the newcomers (folks who have attended less than 3 meetings or are registered as students). One goal is to increase the number of active participants, but we are not turning away people with focused technical goals.
The IETF needs to improved its market across the globe and that really can only feasibly be done electronically. There are needs to take efforts of getting electronic participants more involved. I think it can start with first helping and mentoring I-D writers.
I believe your concerns go well beyond the scope of the mentoring program. There have been discussions on how to increase the performance of our remote participants (http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg77020.html).
What generally happens when an individual I-D is submitted? Is there an overseer of the submissions and decides there is something that interest the IETF?
No, there is no "overseer". Each participant is free to read (and possibly support) any individual I-D they see published. Typically, the author(s) will start by soliciting reviews of their individual I-D by other IETF participants.
Regards, Brian