On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 03:13:46AM +0000, Lloyd Wood wrote:
> Diversity demands that we include more technically incompetent
> people who are uninterested in protocol designs, from other,
> lesser, high schools.
How can you say ? I can not remember from this thread anything more
than non-actionable boilerplate text about diversity. If i was NomCom i
could make anything i want out of that text. I did write in this thread
a bit of what i think could be actionable, but nobody was
biting/expanding.
Diversity: "insert magic code here. You know what to do".
Can we just make than a BCP please ? No review needed.
Seems like that's what the thread is arguing about.
I really enjoy the relief that this threads rants provide
given some nasty debugging at work, but if anybody would
like to see actual progress on diversity in the IETF, then
i would suggest pundits provide more explicit problem statements
and actionable recommendations how to solve them with explanations as
to why that action is efficient and effective.
Cheers
toerless
> Lloyd Wood lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx http://about.me/lloydwood
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Nico Williams <nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: Mallory Knodel <mallory@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Christian Huitema <huitema@xxxxxxxxxxx>; ietf@xxxxxxxx
> Sent: Friday, 28 September 2018, 8:57
> Subject: Re: Diversity considerations
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 07:25:29PM +0000, Mallory Knodel wrote:
> > I would argue the IETF is a lot more like a community or movement than
> > it is like a car company.
>
> Community. It's not a political or cultural movement at all. It is
> decidedly not 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).
>
> [I'm assuming that 'diversity' here means diversity of racial, ethnic,
> and national make-up of the community, as well as diversity of sexual
> orientation, sex / gender identification, and so on. I specifically
> assume that diversity of technical background of participants is not in
> scope.]
>
> We, IETF participants, are mostly self-selected. That is, we each have
> some personal motivation to participate, and so we do. Many of us
> participate in part because our employers want us to, but even so, we're
> often self-selected anyways in that we sought or developed positions
> where we are expected to participate in the IETF, or we sought
> management approval of our participation. Others of us are consultants
> and participate on behalf of customers. Yet others are participants
> independent of compensation by any third parties. Some participants are
> remote-only, thus making it difficult to observe their diversity.
>
> The IETF does not choose its participants. Its participants are the
> ones choosing to participate in the IETF. Thus it is difficult to see
> what policies the IETF could adopt that might increase participant
> diversity.
>
> The IETF does choose its officers (using the term loosely), such as IESG
> members. Any claims of illegal discrimination in this should be
> addressed immediately, of course.
>
> There are basically only four policies I can think of that might have an
> effect on IETF participant diversity:
>
> - targeted advertisement for participants
> - selective exclusion of participants
> - ask employers to help by doing one, the other, or both of the above
> - ask non-diverse participants to consider self-exclusion
>
> I'll note that normally we only exclude participants for cause. I doubt
> existing participants are keen to self-exclude in order to increase the
> diversity of the remaining community. That doesn't leave a lot of
> options. Perhaps an expert can propose other possible policies?
>
> I would say that we are in fact quite diverse, in at least one way:
> we're a very international community because a) we are a very technical
> community that attracts interest from companies and individuals in many
> countries, b) we work hard to host meetings outside the U.S. and Canada.
> We have participants from many countries. Some of us who participate
> from the U.S., are ourselves diverse in a variety of ways, such as being
> immigrants, for example.
>
> Has the Internet Society/IAOC/IAB/IESG/IRTF/IETF studied the diversity
> of these communities? Have there been surveys or censuses of IETF
> participants? Have we identified specific axes of diversity where we're
> coming up short? How are such things being measured? Is there an RFC
> setting out yardsticks for measuring IETF diversity? How do we measure
> the diversity of remote-only participants? Is there any data available
> on these matters?
>
> I, for one, have never been surveyed as an IETF participant. Nor have I
> ever heard of a survey of IETF participant diversity. I assume we have
> no data as to our diversity. Can you confirm this? If so, perhaps we
> should strice to acquire such data.
>
> We do seem to be more diverse today that in years past, though that
> would be a subjective and personal assessment given the lack of hard
> data; others might disagree. Yet I would not say that the IETF has
> failed in the past for having been less diverse than it is today, and I
> would not blame any technical failures on the IETF not being diverse
> enough, unless the only thing we consider when referring to IETF
> successes/failures is participant diversity (in which case see above
> commentary about the community's self-selection nature).
>
> To quote you again:
>
>
> > Since consensus on protocols across a wide and growing technical
> > community is the goal, diversity is a key element of that. [...]
>
> How is diversity a key element of technical success? Did TCP/IP fail
> because its authors were not diverse? Or did TCP/IP succeed in spite of
> its authors' [presumptive!] lack of diversity? Or are we talking about
> something other than the success of our protocols?
>
> I wouldn't say that "consensus on protocols ..." is "the goal".
> Consensus is a *tool* by which we develop protocols. As such consensus
> is a goal during development. But ultimately, the protocols -or perhaps
> their functionality- alone are the goal.
>
> The community itself is also a goal, of course, because it is a means to
> the end producing more/better Internet protocols, and because many of us
> derive personal pleasure from the community and our participation in it.
>
> I would agree -who wouldn't?!- that a community should be welcoming,
> friendly, non-discriminatory, and aware of biases, which should
> hopefully lead to a diverse community (though again, being
> self-selected, there can be no guarantee of this).
>
> In particular, no one should fear participating in the IETF!
>
> But I would be very careful of implying that a) we're not diverse
> [enough], and b) we're failing to produce successful protocols because
> of (a). (a) requires hard _data_, and (b) need not follow from (a).
>
> Now, if you'd said that we should have inclusivity as a goal, I would
> agree. And if you could point to ways in which we're not inclusive, I
> would agree that must address those issues. Absolutely, no doubt. And
> if you wanted us to pursue reasonable, non-exclusionary policies to
> perhaps increase our diversity, I would approve wholeheartedly.
>
> We don't have to believe that lack of diversity implies failure of our
> technical products in order to develop a more welcoming community
> (assuming it isn't already). I think we'll all agree work on making our
> community as welcoming as possible without having to believe that it is
> a fundamental prerequisite of protocol design and writing technical
> documents.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nico
>
> --
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