Subject: Re: Diversity considerations

From: tom petch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 09:27:19 +0000

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nico Williams" <[email-masked]>
To: "Phillip Hallam-Baker" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2018 9:32 PM

> On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 12:44:16PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > Nico is right in saying we don't choose who decides to participate.
But we
> > do influence that choice.
> >
> > In particular, we can decide which communities to approach to invite
> > participation from and we can encourage or discourage people who
come to
> > participate. We are not the passive captives of fate that some folk
seem to
> > suggest.
>
> I made this point too.  Right now we don't advertise to get
> participants.  People end up having a reason to participate, and
> then they do (maybe; sometimes they have a reason and then don't).
>
> > I first started participating in IETF 25 years ago but I have not
> > participated here continuously. One of the reasons for that was that
I did
> > not find IETF an inviting place to work. Folk would proclaim with
great
> > certitude 'facts' about the nature of URLs and explain how it was
necessary
> > to 'fix' the 'broken' architecture of the Web.
>
> That's to be expected.  We're going to have opinionated people.
That's
> not really a problem.
>
> The biggest problem here is how slow everything is.  That's because
> we're volunteers and we're not fully funded to do things like review
> other people's I-Ds.  People who want to create would prefer to write
> code and screw standardization at IETF.

Nico

I see it differently, being involved with other volunteer organisations
that can and do move quickly.  The issue I see is a lack of management,
that the IETF is largely driven from below. The weakness, for me,
manifests itself  in the lack of input by WG Chairs.  Thus I would like
such chairs to be discouraged from creating I-Ds, rather focussing on
helping other people's I-Ds progress.  When a chair creates an I-D, then
they are spending less time on managing the work of others, they cannot
themselves perform the role of the chair w.r.t. the I-D, they may have a
conflict of interest between the ideas in their I-D and those of other
I-Ds, all bad news for progress.  I think, too, that chairs should be
restrained in their comments, being more in the role of a casting vote,
rather than cheer-leader for any particular idea.

Yes, volunteers are motivated by all sorts of reasons, somewhat
different to an employee of a commercial organisation, and may not take
kindly to being told what to do and what not to do by someone 'managing'
the process but most participants show an affiliation, e.g. in their
e-mail address, with a commercial organisation that I assume is
cognisant with their contributions and has an interest in the work
progressing so they are volunteers in name, but with a commercial
imperative in the background.

Tom Petch

> > Finally, unless you happen to be Dave Clark or Vint Cerf and you
happen to
> > be designing a packet switching protocol to support a WAN of 10-1000
nodes
> > using 1970s technology, attempting to emulate their mode of work is
> > irrelevant. We are not re-designing IP. We are trying to manage the
social
> > and technical consequences of the network scaling to ~10 billion
users and
> > ~1 trillion nodes in the coming decade.
>
> We don't work the same way that they did, and we're not trying to
> emulate them.
>
> However, it's hard to make a volunteer organization work on a basis
> other than consensus seeking, if that's what you mean.
>
> Nico
> --
>

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 08:36:53 -0700

> This could be made to matter to tenure and promotion committees

if you mean academic, like ha ha.

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 11:48:43 -0400

> if you mean academic, like ha ha.

The traditional academic lit model is dying. There is actually scope to
replace it but we can merely be part of a wider movement.

Governments throughout the world are tired of paying billions of dollars
for public research that can only be accessed by paying ridiculous amounts
to publishers of academic journals that pay for precisely none of the
material they publish. The editors, the authors, everyone gives their
services for free. Not surprisingly, governments are starting to prohibit
publication of research paid for with public funds in journals that are not
open access. They control the grants, they can easily trample over what the
publishers imagine to be their rights.

But there is a much deeper problem in that the model of publishing that has
arisen was never designed to support grant giving or tenure track
promotion. That is an emergent property of a process it is ill suited for.
The current model encourages a whole series of detrimental behaviors such
as data hoarding and minimum publishable units. Much of what appears in the
academic lit is rubbish because it is what is publishable rather than what
is useful. The easiest way to a tenured chair is to concentrate on timid
projects that are more or less guaranteed to provide publishable results.
Risk taking is discouraged, failure is punished.

---

From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 10:59:43 -0500

> Risk taking is discouraged, failure is punished.

I feel like this is veering off-topic for this list.

-Ben

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 13:20:13 -0400

Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]> wrote:
    >> The traditional academic lit model is dying. There is actually scope
    >> to replace it but we can merely be part of a wider movement.

...

    > I feel like this is veering off-topic for this list.

PHB did veer slightly off, but only to make the point that the current model
is dying, but that we can be part of the solution.  We could even lead it in
our part of the space.

My point is that we need to better acknowledge contributions in the form of
review into our documents.  I pointed to the datatracker that keeps track of
formal reviews, and that is definitely good data, but I feel that it needs to
make into the document in a way that provides clear credit.

This is part of the diversity consideration because not everyone can
contribute by writing documents, but they often can contribute through
review.  Review is as important, maybe even more important, than the writing
itself.

We do not, for instance, even have a clear tradition to acknowledge the WG
chairs in the documents, which makes it hard for employers to agree to
allocate valuable time that could (as Nico writes) be spend writing code, to
instead manage process.

I'd like the acknowledgements to be structured (i.e. present in the XML as
structured entries).

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 13:36:11 -0500

On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 01:20:13PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:

+1

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 16:30:33 -0400

--On Friday, September 28, 2018 14:15 -0400 Alissa Cooper
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> How is country of origin determined?  I'm guessing it has to
>> be by the authors' addresses on their RFCs.  
> 
> Yes, I believe. That is why I think "country of residence"
> is the better approximate descriptor.

Noting that a significant number of RFCs and I-Ds seem to be
published these days with no author "address" information other
than an email address  (especially because many email addresses
these day give no information about country locations at all),
is that information only about people who volunteer country
information?

Would you and the IESG recommend that the RFC Editor tighten up
enforcement of what was historically a rule requiring at least
some location-related information?

That said, as Eliot and others have argued, what we really need
is diversity of perspectives.  Some of the discussion seems to
be trending toward diversity among those factors that can easily
be measured and assessed quantitatively.   I suggest that the
latter cluster of attributes are not a good surrogate for the
former.

If we think it is appropriately applied to the IETF, Kevin's
observation about "being open to help from all walks of life" my
be especially interesting in this regard because, for example,
there may be fewer differences along a variety of scales among
people who are practicing Internet engineering as a professional
career than between most of them and what would be called,
statistically, the general population.   In some respects, that
may be another problem -- I've heard the argument that, to
succeed in engineering fields, women need to behave more like
men.  Having not had the experience, I don't know whether that
is true.  I've fairly sure that, as requirements go, it is
undesirable to interpret "try to be sure there are women" into
"it is ok to satisfy that criterion exclusively with women who
have behaved "like men" (whatever that means) all of their
careers.

best,
   john

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 12:45:13 -0800

On 10/1/18 12:30 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
> In some respects, that

As enlightening as it nearly always is to overhear men discuss
women in computing, it seems to me that there are times an
intervention is called for, as in this case.  With all due
respect, John, these comments reflect some fairly widespread
yet still peculiar notions around gender.  For starters, while
heaven knows that the very last thing that I want to see on an IETF
mailing list is people trying to define what it is to behave
like a man, the above comment is meaningless without a shared
understanding of what "behave more like a man" means (AND NO, THIS
IS NOT AN INVITATION TO HAVE THAT DISCUSSION).  But more to the
point, a woman who behaves "like men" is still a woman, has still
been treated like a woman, and has the experience of being a
woman.

I am not optimistic about making progress on diversity issues
in the IETF over the shorter because we will never be able to come
to consensus on these issues.  On the other hand I am optimistic
about it in the longer term (albeit possibly much longer term)
because of that arc of history thing.

Soldier on,

Melinda

-- 
Melinda Shore
[email-masked]

Software longa, hardware brevis

---

From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 21:47:23 +0100

> latter cluster of attributes are not a good surrogate for the
Diversity of perspectives is more likely the more visible diversity is. Or
perhaps it's only thought to be, but that is in itself a positive step.

It might seem crass to focus on diverse gender, sexuality, skin colour,
nationality and so on. But if faced with a group obviously diverse in all
those dimensions, people with differing viewpoints and perspectives are
more likely to feel comfortable participating themselves.

On the other hand, if every participant, no matter how wonderfully diverse
their perspectives may be, is a white male heterosexual American, that's
surely going to make anyone who isn't feel an outlier - and probably an
outsider.

Dave.

---

From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 21:59:09 +0100

> been treated like a woman, and has the experience of being a
I'm not defending the way John put that, nor disagreeing with what you say.
However I took what John wrote to be a clumsy way of saying - in more
general terms - that we should ensure that it's the community that adapts
to diversity, and not for anyone to conform to the existing community
norms, nor for the community to attract only those individuals who
willingly so conform.

Dave.

---

From: "Andrew G. Malis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 17:45:41 -0400

John,

In my more recent RFCs, I only use my name, current affiliation, and a
personal email address since the other information (physical address, phone
number, company email) changes so often that it would be useless for anyone
to try to use it to contact me, and that's really the point of contact
information.

Cheers,
Andy

---

From: Daniel Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 14:53:39 -0700

On 9/27/18 1:46 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 2018-09-28 04:11, Christian Huitema wrote:
>>
>> On 9/27/2018 8:36 AM, Mallory Knodel wrote:
>>> On 27/09/2018 16:01, Joel Halpern wrote:
>>>> If I am reading that article correctly, he is referring to diversity as
>>>> a core competency of his (and other) organizations.  That is an odd
>>>> linguistic use, but one I can understand.
>>>>  From an individuals perspective (or equally from the perspective of
>>>> evaluating individuals for something) diversity is a property but not a
>>>> competency.  A person can change their receptivity to diversity in
>>>> others, but can not change their own diversity.  Going further, as far
>>>> as I can tell it is not meaningful to ask "is this individual diverse?"
>>> Hi Joel,
>>>
>>> Yes that's very close. She is writing specifically to flip this notion
>>> that diversity is not a property, but a competency. It's exactly trying
>>> to challenge the existing notion and create space to discuss it in terms
>>> of competency.
>> I have heard that theory many times during various "diversity training"
>> exercises. The proposition is that a product development team will not
>> successfully address the needs of a specific class of customers if there
>> are no members of that class of customers in the team. It is a theory
>> that sounds appealing, but that does not necessarily make it true. To
>> give two counter examples: Nintendo games are very successful with young
>> children, yet I am pretty sure that there are very few young children if
>> any in their development team; Toyota successfully developed the Lexus
>> brand to sell luxury cars in America, yet the original development team
>> was all Japanese. The common point in these two counter examples is that
>> the development teams cared a lot about the population of customers that
>> they were addressing, and went to great lengths to study their needs. It
>> seems to me that as far as product development is concerned, the key to
>> success is not so much who you are as who you care for.
>>
>> Of course, that does not mean that having multiple perspectives is not
>> important. A team in which everybody thinks alike is very likely to
>> engage in group-think and be blind to events. For example, if I had
>> mostly nerds in a team, I would want to add artists. If my team members
>> cared mostly about engineering and performance, I would want to add
>> advocates for usability and design. We have many dimensions of that in
>> the IETF, security, performance, privacy, ease of use, maintenance,
>> operations, scaling, internationalization. Different people have
>> different priorities. We should try to select for this kind of diversity
>> in the leadership.
> OK. I'd buy:
>
> We expect our leaders to value and promote diversity of all kinds.

   No we don't. Many kinds of diversity have no bearing on the IETF.
And there are documented cases where people in high tech would like
less diversity.

   Like what you ask? Well, Mozilla was doing OK under Brendan Eich. Then
it came out that he gave money to an anti-gay marriage campaign. Was
diversity of opinion on the topic of gay marriage important to Mozilla?
Apparently not. Even demonstrated competence at the CEO level was not
enough to counter-balance the mono-culture on opinion of gay marriage
that Mozilla wanted, so out he went.

   Speaking for everyone, I think it's safe to say we don't want diversity
of all kinds (how many MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporters do *you* think the
IETF needs and do we need to ensure that number is reflected in 
leadership?),
we want diversity of certain things that are important to make us operate
better and produce standards that are higher quality. Now, what are those
characteristics?

   Or is the diversity being discussed here like that line from the
Blues Brothers, "oh we like all kinds of music here, both country AND
western." We want to promote all kinds of diversity here: race, gender,
sexual orientation, AND ethnicity.

   regards,

   Dan.

---

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 15:10:27 -0700

> that Mozilla wanted, so out he went.

I think it may be worthwhile to read Mitchell Baker's post on Brendan's
decision.  It is here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/03/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/

It highlights that it can be a struggle to support both equality and free
speech, but that doing so helps organizations committed to the potential of
the Web (or Internet) see them reach that potential.  While I have never
worked for Mozilla, the given summary of their mission:

"our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity is
stronger, more inclusive and more just: that’s what it means to protect the
open Web."

seems to fit will the ethos of those I know who have worked there.

Simplifying their struggle to achieve balance while furthering that mission
does not seem to me to advance our own discussions much.  I think it would
be better if we focused our discussions on our own efforts.

Just my personal opinion, of course,

Ted Hardie

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Oct 2018 18:28:08 -0400

In article <[email-masked]> you write:
>We want to promote all kinds of diversity here: race, gender,

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

---

From: Daniel Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 15:34:39 -0700

Hi Ted,

On 10/1/18 3:10 PM, Ted Hardie wrote:
> I think it may be worthwhile to read Mitchell Baker's post on 
> Brendan's decision.  It is here:
>
> It highlights that it can be a struggle to support both equality and 
> free speech, but that doing so helps organizations committed to the 
> potential of the Web (or Internet) see them reach that potential.  
> While I have never worked for Mozilla, the given summary of their mission:
>
> "our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity 
> is stronger, more inclusive and more just: that’s what it means to 
> protect the open Web."

   So a mono-culture of opinions on gay marriage ensures Mozilla can put
it's "focus back on protecting the Web." Which is odd. We will have a
mono-culture on this issue and ... protect the Web! There's a certain
"underpants gnomes" [1] thing going on. Or perhaps they mean some people
would not want to use a product developed by "those people" and would stop
using Mozilla which would... stop protecting the Web? Whatever. "Humanity
is stronger when Brendan Eich is not our CEO" is quite a statement!

> Simplifying their struggle to achieve balance while furthering that 
> mission does not seem to me to advance our own discussions much.  I 
> think it would be better if we focused our discussions on our own efforts.

   I was not simplifying their "struggle", only pointing out that there are
examples of tech valuing a mono-culture so we can't say we want "diversity
of all kinds." We need to say what kinds of diversity we want. And I'd hope
it won't be done with statements designed to avoid discussion such as:
"diversity is a competency."

> Just my personal opinion, of course,

   And, again, I am a better person for having received it. Thank you.

   That said, I was actually trying to focus the discussion on our own
efforts. And would like to know which of the almost infinite possibilities
we are seeking diversity in. I'm hoping it's not just a catch word for
giving points to people based on how far away from some idealized version
of a "majority culture" they are-- e.g. the lesbian muslim from Tashkent
gets more "diversity" points than the black man from Los Angeles.

   regards,

   Dan.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 19:00:56 -0400

--On Thursday, September 27, 2018 04:27 -0700 S Moonesamy
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> There is a plethora of articles/blogs... out there about
>> diverse  interview panels being key to achieving diversity.
> 
> I read some articles about the topic.

Padma,

I'm reasonably familiar with that literature and some of the
underlying studies and have been quite impressed with both the
diversity outcome and general quality ones by other measures.
Whether it is usefully applicable to the IETF nominations and
selection process is another matter; see below.
 
>> Today, AFAIK (I may be wrong or unaware of unwritten rules)
>> it  seems that company affiliation is the main diversity
>> factor.
> 
> Affiliation is part of the (written) selection criteria.

More precisely, it is, at least AFAIK, the only easily-measured
factor in the rules other than the basic "Nomcom eligibility"
ones.  
 
>> Undoubtedly, this is a good start but surely it can be
>> augmented for  other diversity considerations as well such as
>> gender parity...
>...

>> If we are committed on diversity and enlarging the pool of 
>> candidates then possible starting points could be
>...
>> 1. More diversity on the interview panels and other levels 
>> contributing to key selection criteria
>...

> The first point would be challenging.  There is an existing
> mentorship programme (point 2).  As for point 3, please see
> draft-klensin-nomcom-incumbents-first-00.

Since one of my efforts to sort through pieces of this (it went
nowhere, and so did all of its relatives) was cited, let me
address that first, challenging, point.

I think what has gotten lost in this piece of the discussion is
that the Nomcom isn't an "interview panel", it is a selection
mechanism and panel.  Perhaps more important, when the mechanism
of selection by a Nominations Committee was established, there
were two key assumptions about that committee.  

First, the Nomcom membership was expected to represent a random
sample of IETF participants.  At least implicitly, part of that
expectation was that the workload and duration would be
sufficiently low that the people who would volunteer would be a
good enough sample of the community that a random selection of
them would closely approximate a good random sample of the
community.  That is almost certainly no longer the case: Nomcoms
are a lot of work for their members, requiring very active
involvement for many months.  That, in turn, biases the pool
toward people who have unlimited time to devote to the IETF, who
do not have significant other IETF responsibilities (e.g., for
technical work, as WG Chairs, etc.), and, for people with
significant organizational/employer commitments, whose
organizations are willing to support Nomcom-type work.  

Second, there was an assumption --again, at least implicit--
that Nomcom members would actually know, and often would have
worked with, most of the plausible candidates for IESG and IAB
positions and therefore be able to rely on their own knowledge
and make selections by discussing that knowledge and
experiences.  Perhaps at least in part because of the changes
above and because the IETF has simply gotten bigger with more
participants who are specialized in one particular area, that is
no longer the case.  As a result (I think) Nomcoms are
increasingly dependent on questionnaires (another problem, IMO,
interviews, and recommendations/endorsements rather than
first-hand knowledge of candidates by members.  Those approaches
are inherently time-consuming, reinforcing the
statistically-biased membership described above.

Given that backdrop, I doubt that one could tinker with
selection criteria for the Nomcom (beyond the "no more than two
from a company" rule) without making the Nomcom even less
representative of the community.  In other words, one might
increase one type of (easily-measured) diversity there at the
expense of decreasing overall representativeness and range of
experience and perspectives. 

Now I think that it may be time to rethink the Nomcom model,
including the random selection idea, entirely, but I have seen
little or no sign of energy in the community for dealing with
that ... and no good ideas for consideration either.

    best,
      john

---

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2018 16:02:28 -0700

On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 3:34 PM Daniel Harkins <[email-masked]> wrote:

> <snip>

> "diversity is a competency."

As I've said before, efforts to increase to diversity represent a long term
optimization.  By making more visible that opportunities are present for
all, diversity initiatives attempt to broaden the pool of talent over
time.  If
people who would previously have left a field stay or folks who had not
thought of entering a field do so, that field wins.  The scale of that win
can be the field of  "Science, Technology, Engineering, Math" or it can be
"working group leadership" or "the IETF".  But a bigger pool of talent to
draw from is a good result for almost any sized field.  As others have
pointed out, different perspectives improve the results of many engineering
efforts; larger pools of potential contributors may also lower the amount
of work any individual contributor has to do to get a goal met.  Both are
better outcomes than you'd get, in other words, with less diversity.

You've asked several times what kind of diversity we're aiming to enable,
but the answer to that for any organization is embedded in the question of
who is excluded, discouraged, or not valued.  That means looking seriously
at economic barriers, at systems that promote based on social networks, and
at structural inequality.

Before we take on that fairly difficult task, the simplest possible thing
we can do here is to ask the NomCom, when they have multiple candidates
each of whom could do the job, is to consider the impact of their selection
on the pool of talent over time.  That amounts to asking them to consider
the long term optimization rather than a simple stack rank.  Given the
short time frames and heavy loads we place on the NomCom, asking for that
and no more may be the best thing we can do at the moment.

I think that is worth doing now, even if I don't get to be part of the
NomCom discussion of which particular form of diversity might contribute to
the optimization.

Again, just my personal response,

Ted Hardie

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 00:11:19 +0000 (UTC)

"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 [email-masked] http://about.me/lloydwood

________________________________
From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked] 
Sent: Tuesday, 2 October 2018, 8:28
Subject: Re: Diversity considerations

R's,
John

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 20:20:35 -0400

--On Monday, October 1, 2018 17:45 -0400 "Andrew G. Malis"
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> John,
> 
> In my more recent RFCs, I only use my name, current
> affiliation, and a personal email address since the other
> information (physical address, phone number, company email)
> changes so often that it would be useless for anyone to try to
> use it to contact me, and that's really the point of contact
> information.

Andy, I didn't mean to suggest that there were not perfectly
good reasons for providing less information in "author's
address".   Certainly there are.   On the other hand, if we are
trying to do statistics based on location information, unless we
are getting that information from substantially everyone, it
makes those statistics fairly useless... at least unless someone
can make a really persuasive case that those who supply the
information are no different from a population standpoint than
those who don't.

Of course, if we did want "country of residence" or "country of
origin" information for statistical purposes and thought it was
important enough, we could insist that I-Ds and RFCs show
country (or continent, or region) even if they didn't show other
address information.  There are at least some people in the
community who move around enough internationally that such a
requirement wouldn't work either, but my guess is that they are
statistically far fewer than those who change physical address,
phone number, and company email much more often than they change
countries or regions.

It is not yet clear to me that we care enough that we should
bother.  I'm just still sampling statistician enough to be
disturbed when we cite statistics and consider making policy
based on them when the sample populations are suspect due to
censored data -- regardless of the cause of the censorship and
without implying any intentional misbehavior about it.

best,
   john

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 21:08:03 -0400

--On Monday, October 1, 2018 12:45 -0800 Melinda Shore
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> yet still peculiar notions around gender. 
>...

Melinda,

I knew that was a badly flawed example.  You have just pointed
out one of several reasons why.   In my defense, it isn't an
example I (as one of those white, North American, heterosexual,
male types) made up.  It came, as accurately as I can remember,
out of a conversation among several rather experienced women in
computing at which I had the unique advantage of being the only
male present.  No one, least of all me, doubts that the
experience is still different, but part of the argument was that
they, because of years of industry experience that they have
survived, couldn't claim to accurately represent women in
general or even a cross-section of women starting in the
industry.   Of course, given a choice between having them speak
for, or try to represent, those other populations of women and
either having a man do it or to have no one speak for them at
all, they would be the better choice, but it would still be one
population group trying to speak for other groups that they are
either not part of or for which they represent a corner case.

> For starters, while
> heaven knows that the very last thing that I want to see on an
> IETF mailing list is people trying to define what it is to
> behave like a man, the above comment is meaningless without a
> shared understanding of what "behave more like a man" means
> (AND NO, THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION TO HAVE THAT DISCUSSION).
> But more to the point, a woman who behaves "like men" is still
> a woman, has still been treated like a woman, and has the
> experience of being a woman.

Agree completely.  See above.

> in the IETF over the shorter because we will never be able to
> come to consensus on these issues.  On the other hand I am
> optimistic about it in the longer term (albeit possibly much
> longer term) because of that arc of history thing.

I'm actually somewhat optimistic in the medium term if we can be
as open as possible (including trying to do some recruiting as
others have suggested) to very broad and diverse (by any
quantitative or qualitative measure people can think up)
populations of newcomers.   That includes continuing
improvements and how we try to do mentoring.  I think it
includes trying to get much more open to mostly-remote
participants in mentor roles than, e.g., the EDU team has been
in the past, if only because that might be a way to expand the
pool of potential mentors and make it more diverse.

There are still questions that I don't even know how to
formulate, much less think for which I have answers.   For
example, if we have newcomers who would prefer mentors who are
"like them" on some set of dimensions but we have no candidate
mentors with both those properties and expertise in the IETF and
the technology of interest, how do we advise them about
matching?  I think that they should make the choices rather than
having the choices made for them, but I'm not even completely
sure about that.  It really doesn't change the matching problem
when there is no really good comprehensive match, only who is
responsible.   

However I still think significant improvements lie in those
directions, even in the medium term.  If that makes me more
optimistic than you are, maybe I'm just naive.

thanks,
    john

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 08:59:13 +0200

Hi Dan,

> "diversity is a competency."

The reason I raised this point in response to Brian's draft has to do
with the organization being blindsided, particularly the IAB.  In this
sense I view a monoculture as an existential threat to the organization,
simply because we won't be prepared for whatever Next Big Thing comes
along, or we won't know when we are actually creating risks to our own
organization.  I believe we are in this very situation today.  The only
way out of it that I can think of is very broad and diverse experience
and expertise.  I don't necessarily measure that in skin tone, sexual
preference, gender, age, or what passport one holds, although those are
sometimes good indicators of that sort of diversity, but I don't think
there can be an answer to your question, simply because we don't know
what the Next Big Thing will be.

Eliot

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2018 01:37:38 -0700

Hi John,

Thank you for explaining why things were done in such a way.

>factor in the rules other than the basic "Nomcom eligibility"

Was antitrust law a consideration?

>sample of IETF participants.  At least implicitly, part of that

IETF Management has been using "attendees" and "participants" 
interchangeably over the years.  Did anyone from Management compare 
participants versus attendees over the years?

There were comments on the thread about reviewing I-Ds.  The 
statistics focus on RFC authorship.  If participation is measured in 
terms of authorship, it does not make sense to perform reviews except 
if there is commercial value in performing that work.

>organizations are willing to support Nomcom-type work.

Based on the description for IAOC positions I would say that the 
committee does not do technical work. Is there be a perception that 
there is an unwritten requirement about the country of residence to 
be eligible?

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 15:33:18 +0200

And as if on queue, there's an entertaining book out about this very
subject, The Big Disruption by Jessica Powell, ex Google, freely
available @ https://disruption.medium.com.  There's a review in today's
New York Times...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/technology/silicon-valleys-keystone-problem-a-monoculture-of-thought.html

Eliot

---

From: Yoav Nir <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 20:31:43 +0300

ISTM that it’s always English speakers who are concerned about people who speak languages not written in Latin characters. 

Thanks you for your concern, but I don’t think that forking technical discussions and coming up with drafts that most of the community will not be able to read is solving any problem. 

Yoav

> On 2 Oct 2018, at 3:11, Lloyd Wood <lloyd.wood=[email-masked]> wrote:
>

---

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 Oct 2018 13:45:28 -0400

> Thanks you for your concern, but I don’t think that forking technical discussions and coming up with drafts that most of the community will not be able to read is solving any problem.

I don't want and I'm pretty sure Lloyd doesn want anyone to write I-Ds in 
Hebrew or Tamil, I want people who can say informed things about IDN and 
other i18n proposals that involve strings written in their languages.

R's,
John

---

From: Yoav Nir <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 21:11:18 +0300

> On 2 Oct 2018, at 20:45, John R Levine <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> I don't want and I'm pretty sure Lloyd doesn want anyone to write I-Ds in Hebrew or Tamil, I want people who can say informed things about IDN and other i18n proposals that involve strings written in their languages.

Lloyd’s proposal is about discussions happening in a foreign language which lead to drafts in that foreign language, although he probably intended that language to be Chinese rather than Hebrew or Tamil.  I still think that having separate discussions in two languages on the same technical issue is less productive that having one such discussion, even if the common language is not the most convenient for all participants. 

At I2NSF we have a unique situation that most of our draft authors are Korean. It may be more productive for them to have the technical discussions in Korean, but that would exclude any other participants (as well as the chairs). I just don’t think it would be a good idea, and to be clear, nobody has suggested that we do this — I am only using it as an example.

As for i18n, I don’t think that I or any other foreign language speaker have any special competence in any of this. I can spot bi-directional failure, such as the “I speak Hebrew” buttons from a few years ago that were printed backwards, but I think any of our unicode experts knows more about the issues of bi-directionality and scripts with multiple forms (or is it glyphs?) far more than I do.  I can only look at an output and say, “No, this doesn’t look right”.  

Yoav

---

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 Oct 2018 14:19:45 -0400

> As for i18n, I don’t think that I or any other foreign language speaker have any special competence in any of this. I can spot bi-directional failure, such as the “I speak Hebrew” buttons from a fe…

Having been working in i18n for a while, merely having people who can say 
no, that's now how one would render that text is often useful.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

---

From: Padmadevi Pillay Esnault <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 19:01:54 +0000

Hello John

See PPE below

On 10/1/18, 7:01 PM, "ietf on behalf of John C Klensin" <[email-masked] on behalf of [email-masked]> wrote:

    Padma,

    ones.

<PPE>

Agree this metric is easily measured.

Would you agree ”is it enough?”  is an interesting worthwhile question?

<PPE>

As there is no specific literature here, so the context might have been unclear.

IMO, the selection of a candidate is typically the result of the debrief of an interview panel.

<PPE>

We are in agreement here.

<PPE>

Thanks for giving some context – indeed that shrinks the pool of viable candidates

Would you agree that this assumption also brings with it unconscious bias?

<PPE>

Hmm … not convinced here …

We are mostly in agreement.

If no change is made then we back to square one.

Reading through the thread, diversity also may mean something different depending on your personal experience or interest: technical diversity, diversity in companies by business, geographical location. large/small companies, gender …

May be the first step is to define what type of diversity would be beneficial..

However, after the very long thead(s), I am pessimistic on getting consensus on this ….

<PPE>

As the thread is already long, taking discussion offline best

Regards

Padma

        best,

          john

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 21:13:08 +0200

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

---

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 2 Oct 2018 15:34:05 -0400

> have kids speak and write english fluently. ...

Sorry, but this completely misses the point I was making.  I agree that it 
makes sense for the IETF to do its work in English.

But there are several billion people in the world who for various reasons 
do not speak English, or prefer to speak their own langauge to each other. 
Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet worked for them, too?  That's why I 
want people who understand how their own languages work and can check the 
assumptions we make who speak English and other languages written in the 
Latin alphabet.

R's,
John

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2018 16:10:53 -0500

On Tue, Oct 02, 2018 at 03:34:05PM -0400, John R Levine wrote:
> But there are several billion people in the world who for various reasons do
> not speak English, or prefer to speak their own langauge to each other.
> Wouldn't it be nice if the Internet worked for them, too?  That's why I want
> people who understand how their own languages work and can check the

You two are talking past each other.

Our specs should be written in English.  Our protocols should be
internationalized.

I don't think you'll find anyone here who disagrees with either or both
of those two statements.

Your point has been, I think, that you would like to see more
participants whose first languages are not English, or at least who have
useful things to say about internationalization that we might not.

I continue to say that mostly we should work with the UC on difficult
I18N problems and rely on them (since they have change control on
Unicode).  Those diverse participants who could help us with I18N should
*also* be helping the UC.  I realize that the structure of the UC makes
that difficult, so they're better off participating at least here.  I
wish the UC was more like the IETF.  I don't think we can change that.

Nico
--

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2018 00:02:13 +0200

> makes sense for the IETF to do its work in English.

Hmm.. in my outbox it shows that my email was addressed to Lloyd as i
intended it to, commenting on his draft, which was about about communications
in the IETF, not (as i understood it)) about internationalization.

I did not not mean to comment at all about internationalization.

> assumptions we make who speak English and other languages written in the

Sure. Realistically i have no argument against that. Personally and idealistically,
i find varieties of languages great for variety of culture, but bad for communications.
Its like having IPv1...IPv4500 and NAT'ing only works with ALGs. 

Cheers
    Toerless

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2018 02:29:48 +0000 (UTC)

Thankyou for telling me what my my proposal is about.

I really had no idea. Actually...

Lloyd's proposal is about fostering groundswell discussion
in other languages and cultures that eventually leads to
meaningful IETF participation and contributions, with

increased IETF awareness and involvement from those
non-English-speaking, non-north-American, cultures.

(I've written that in third person to give it more
credibility, obviously. note the 'perhaps' in the draft;

internet-drafts in Klingon are not the primary goal here.
Building a welcoming funnel for newbies to progress is.)

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wood-discussion-beyond-english-00

________________________________
From: Yoav Nir <[email-masked]>
To: John R Levine <[email-masked]> 
Cc: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, 3 October 2018, 4:12
Subject: Re: Diversity considerations

Yoav

---

From: Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2018 20:51:50 +0300

On 28/09/2018 12:07, Ole Troan wrote:
> I have never worked in an organisation more diverse than the IETF.

Brian's original draft on community leaders includes a lot of qualities
that community leaders should have. That list has not been taken as an
affront to the IETF community that it lacks leadership qualities to
write such things down.

I would say that even with an existing diverse IETF (along some axes)
that it is worth expressing diversity as a valued quality of leaders.
That is actually the thrust of the entire sub-thread here.

-Mallory

-- 
Mallory Knodel
Head of Digital :: article19.org
gpg fingerprint :: E3EB 63E0 65A3 B240 BCD9  B071 0C32 A271 BD3C C780

---

From: "Kevin A. McGrail" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 19:55:02 -0400

On 9/26/2018 10:37 AM, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
> Tomorrow I am speaking on Inclusion, Meritocracy & the Apache Way for
> ApacheCon in Montreal.
>
Thanks to everyone for the feedback and lively discussion.  I've posted
the slides and the audio track at
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6453763700993118208

Regards,
KAM

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2018 01:35:34 +0000 (UTC)

Wow, your linkedin post is actually insulting to the British.

inclusive? ha.

      From: Kevin A. McGrail <[email-masked]>
 To: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>; Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>; Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>; Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> 
Cc: [email-masked]; IETF discussion list <[email-masked]>
 Sent: Friday, 5 October 2018, 9:55
 Subject: Re: Diversity considerations (was: Re: General non-confidential input to NomCom)

Regards,
KAM