On 26-Jul-19 02:37, Keith Moore wrote:
> On 7/25/19 10:09 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>
> I guess I think there is some potential for positive change there if, for example, we can reduce the cost of effective participation.
I'm all for that, but of course we cannot reduce the cost of hours of work
done between meetings, which can be a very significant burden for small
companies or individual contributors, but lost in the noise for large
companies. So I think it's realistic to solicit more comments and reviews
from such participants, but somewhat unrealistic to expect more drafting
work from them. In other words, don't expect that making meetings more
accessible will substantially change the bias towards large-company
authorship.
Brian
