Hi Christian, I would argue the IETF is a lot more like a community or movement than it is like a car company. Since consensus on protocols across a wide and growing technical community is the goal, diversity is a key element of that. So if we’re not succeeding at community diversity, we’re not succeeding. Period. (To steal the punchline in Alix’s post). -M ----- Original Message ----- From: Christian Huitema <huitema@xxxxxxxxxxx> To: Mallory Knodel <mallory@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Joel Halpern <jmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, ietf@xxxxxxxx Sent: Thu, 27 Sep 2018 16:11:26 -0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Diversity considerations On 9/27/2018 8:36 AM, Mallory Knodel wrote: > On 27/09/2018 16:01, Joel Halpern wrote: >> If I am reading that article correctly, he is referring to diversity as >> a core competency of his (and other) organizations. That is an odd >> linguistic use, but one I can understand. >> From an individuals perspective (or equally from the perspective of >> evaluating individuals for something) diversity is a property but not a >> competency. A person can change their receptivity to diversity in >> others, but can not change their own diversity. Going further, as far >> as I can tell it is not meaningful to ask "is this individual diverse?" > Hi Joel, > > Yes that's very close. She is writing specifically to flip this notion > that diversity is not a property, but a competency. It's exactly trying > to challenge the existing notion and create space to discuss it in terms > of competency. I have heard that theory many times during various "diversity training" exercises. The proposition is that a product development team will not successfully address the needs of a specific class of customers if there are no members of that class of customers in the team. It is a theory that sounds appealing, but that does not necessarily make it true. To give two counter examples: Nintendo games are very successful with young children, yet I am pretty sure that there are very few young children if any in their development team; Toyota successfully developed the Lexus brand to sell luxury cars in America, yet the original development team was all Japanese. The common point in these two counter examples is that the development teams cared a lot about the population of customers that they were addressing, and went to great lengths to study their needs. It seems to me that as far as product development is concerned, the key to success is not so much who you are as who you care for. Of course, that does not mean that having multiple perspectives is not important. A team in which everybody thinks alike is very likely to engage in group-think and be blind to events. For example, if I had mostly nerds in a team, I would want to add artists. If my team members cared mostly about engineering and performance, I would want to add advocates for usability and design. We have many dimensions of that in the IETF, security, performance, privacy, ease of use, maintenance, operations, scaling, internationalization. Different people have different priorities. We should try to select for this kind of diversity in the leadership. -- Christian Huitema
