On 7/25/19 7:47 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Hi Fernando,
On 25-Jul-19 00:28, Fernando Gont wrote:
On 23/7/19 20:17, Eric Gray wrote:
I also tend to agree, sadly. But with a qualification: valuable
people are not typically locked in to working for employers that
cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to do
it and have value to add.
I have no idea what's the rationale for this statement.
I can tell you that it is extremely difficult (if at all possible) to
have your employer support your IETF work in regions such as Latin
America and the Caribbean.
Even for other regions, it would seem
(http://www.arkko.com/tools/recrfcstats/companydistr.html) the vast
majority of recent RFCs have been authored by folks from a dozen
different companies or so. Not a lot of diversity in terms of
affiliations/employers. When looking at countries, it is even more so:
http://www.arkko.com/tools/recrfcstats/d-countrydistr.html
To be honest, I am not so concerned about diversity among the named
authors. IMHO, we need to produce RFCs that are useful to the whole
community, not just to the employers of their authors. Therefore,
what really matters is diversity among the people who review and
comment on drafts, and among those who produce early implementations
and operational feedback.
I am extremely concerned about a lack of employer diversity among
authors/editors. Anyone who has authored or edited an RFC knows that
that role carries with it tremendous power to influence the output, to
word things in such a way that you like the result. (Yes, the author has
to earn rough consensus, but the author still gets to choose the words.)
In a sense, this is the very job of an author or editor. But when the
authors or editors of RFCs are mostly from a small number of large
companies, those RFCs are likely to represent the interests of those
companies much more than the interests of the wider IETF community or
the Internet as a whole.
Keith
