Hi Steve,
At 14:18 01-10-2013, Steve Conte wrote:
One of the goals of the ISOC Fellowship to the IETF programme is to
increase IETF participation in emerging and developing economies, and thus
it contributes to increasing diversity within the IETF. ISOC also has and
supports other activities surrounding the increase of awareness and
participation in the IETF. The fellowship is just one component.
I would like to better understand how the implementation and operation of
this ISOC-driven programme speaks to the larger challenge question of
increasing diversity at IETF.
There is a one-page overview of the IETF provided
by the Internet Society [1]. According to the document:
"The IETF seeks broad participation. The work
of the IETF takes places online,
largely through email lists, reducing
barriers to participation and maximizing
contributions from around the world. IETF
Working Groups (WGs) are organized
by topic into several areas (e.g. routing, transport, security, etc.)."
The document then has a title about "mission and principles" which I'll quote:
"The mission of the IETF is make the Internet work better by producing high
quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design,
use, and manage the Internet."
I read an article written by the Chair of the
IETF. I'll do some selective quoting of that article:
"The IETF can benefit of untapped potential and bring even more energy to
the work."
"We think of diversity as something that covers international participation,
different cultures, gender, age,
organisational background, and so on. While
I am very proud of the IETF as a very international organisation ? with
participants from 60 countries working on documents, for instance there
are many aspects of diversity where we could do much better. Overall
participation is concentrated in some areas of the world, with little
participation from Africa and South America, for instance. Similarly,
while the IETF has some very active female participants and leadership
members, the numbers are very small."
"The diversity team is a design team tasked with understanding the issues
we are facing, drawing in experience from other organizations affected by
similar issues, identifying obstacles to us having the widest breadth of
talented participants and leaders, and making practical recommendations
that could help us improve the situation."
The Chair of the IETF asked for practical
recommendations. It is not for me to make
recommendations. I can only make suggestions
(see
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg82776.html
). If the IETF Area Directors believe that the
suggestions are unpractical or useless they are welcome to ignore them.
In my humble opinion the challenge of the IETF is
to produce high quality, relevant technical
documents. The Chair of the IETF mentioned that
there is very little participation from Africa
and South America. The main point raised during
the discussions about the draft is on-going and
active participation. The question is what can
be done in practice to improve on-going and
active participation from, for example, Africa
and South America without making it even more
difficult for the IETF to produce high quality, relevant technical documents.
I would like to see five Working Groups Chairs
who are residing in South America within a few
years. They will have to earn the role based on
merit and not because they are from South
America. They will have to work hard. They will
have to learn by themselves what John Klensin
means when he says: The "I" in the IETF is not I.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
1. http://www.ietf.org/about/about-the-ietf-en.pdf