Keith, On 26-Jul-19 01:27, Keith Moore wrote: > > 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. That's all true, of course, but it's a fact of life that larger companies can afford to pay some employees to do substantial amounts of IETF work, and smaller companies can't. My comment was based on the assumption that there's no point in being concerned about something that can't be changed. Brian
