IMHO, english is _the_ language of international communications,
and the primary goal should be to give strong guidance to countries to
have kids speak and write english fluently. Many G20 countries do this
already, even as far as using english as the primary teaching language in
specific fields in university. Unfortunately, it is not as ubiquitous as
it could be to favor more easy diversity. Large home markets favor that
insular thinking, but sometimes i even have the impression that specific
countries do not want to promote english more for political or economic
reasons. As in: more of the best people might leave the country to find
better international opportunities if they spoke better english. That is
the mind set i would like to see changed.
My personal impresions of course are more negative than the state of the
youngest generation, because of the age diversity in our industry (aka:
lots of older people like myself). Experiences with 20 year olds show a
lot better fluency in english already.
Wrt. to better supporting all current generations not fluent in english:
I would suggest to allow posting in any language on the 'ietf' mailing
list and then everybody can use their favorite online translation tool.
And of course reply in whatever language one can express him/herself in.
There is also a helpful style and english-learning help that can develop
from this. For example english speakers may want to restate questions in
english to see that online translation worked correctly. And the
non-english speaker can continue to learn english from this.
Of course, there are lots of variations to tune this. Eg: create
ietf-int, so as not to change the primary ietf mailing list, maybe
automatically copy messages from ietf to ietf-int (but not vice-versa),
hopefully thinning out ietf over time. Also check if translations
could/should be built into the list itself:
I am quite happy with google translate for chinese/french/spanish, but
that of course is not available without a VPN in china. So if there is
no openly online translation in China (alibaba/baidu ??, then translation
should be built into the solution. Of course, the IETF could continue
to ignore access issues in China which is also what IETF is doing now,
by posting certain videos only to youtube (such as IETF meeting videos).
Cheers
Toerless
On Tue, Oct 02, 2018 at 12:11:19AM +0000, Lloyd Wood wrote:
> "Actually, I'm more interested in diversity of sconomic backgrounds, in
> particular, countries that aren't in the G20, and that speak languages
> not written in latin characters, because people's use of and
> experience of the Internet are quite different."
>
>
> This is why I wrote
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-wood-discussion-beyond-english/
>
>
> Lloyd Wood lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx http://about.me/lloydwood
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: John Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx>
> To: ietf@xxxxxxxx
> Sent: Tuesday, 2 October 2018, 8:28
> Subject: Re: Diversity considerations
>
>
>
> In article <b03e8de5-0fe1-bd27-7120-ffa129419bb6@xxxxxxxxxx> you write:
>
> >We want to promote all kinds of diversity here: race, gender,
> >sexual orientation, AND ethnicity.
>
> Actually, I'm more interested in diversity of sconomic backgrounds, in
> particular, countries that aren't in the G20, and that speak languages
> not written in latin characters, because people's use of and
> experience of the Internet are quite different.
>
> For example, in India there are tiny little data packages that give
> you a megabyte of data on your phone for a few days. I expect people
> who use those packages use their phones differently from people with
> gigabytes per month.
>
> R's,
> John
