Subject: team to look at diversity

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 07:06:10 +0200

I have an update relating to the diversity discussions we've had on the list and at IETF-86. I promised that I'd set up a design team. I have found two people to lead such a design team: Kathleen Moriarty and Suresh Krishnan. Thank you volunteering to lead this!

Please contact them if you are interested in contributing to the work. I have given them an open assignment, with a desire to get advice on what steps we could take to increase participation in various aspects of the IETF, hoping for some initial advice before the next IETF. The leaders will determine how they want to run the team and who to select to it, but the writeup below is my input for setting the stage and some scope for the work. The design team will present their recommendations to the community, and engage in the discussion. Recommendations with community support will be taken forward. The creation of this team should not stop other efforts or proposals from going forward. For instance, there is an independent effort in looking at improvements in mentoring.

Jari Arkko

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For the purposes of this team, we think of diversity as something that covers international participation, different cultures, gender, age, organisational background, and so on. While the IETF has become a very international organisation (with participants from 60 countries working on documents, for instance), there are many aspects of diversity where we could do much better. Overall participation is concentrated in some areas of the world, with little participation from Africa and South America, for instance. Similarly, while the IETF has some very active female participants and leadership members, the numbers are very small. Much of the work in the IETF is driven by large networking companies, yet academia and small companies would have more to give, and operational experience from additional operators would be similarly appreciated. Importantly, these disparities appear most prominently in our leadership, where institutional and structural issues can lead to even less diversity along all of the above mentioned axes than in our general population. All organisations benefit from a healthy influx of new participants at all levels, and in the IETF we need that to balance our well-established topics and participants, to build the next generation technologies, experts, and leaders.

These issues are of course related to general engineering and industry issues, and are a source of discussions in other similar organisations. But we should not attempt to show how we match or do not match the general patterns. We should rather just make the observation that additional diversity would be beneficial to IETF and improve its results.

The diversity team is a design team tasked with understanding the issues we are facing, drawing in experience from other organizations affected by similar issues, identifying obstacles to us having the widest breadth of talented participants and leaders, and making practical recommendations that could help us improve the situation. It is understood that many improvements may only take effect long-term, such as drawing in more participants from areas of the world where the IETF has traditionally not had much participation. Nevertheless, a set of actionable steps would be useful.

The diversity team is not charged with evaluating the particulars of current or past Nominations Committee (Nomcom) decisions, and any discussion of ongoing NomCom activities is out of scope. The NomCom is expected to continue to do its utmost to recruit and appoint a top-notch and well-rounded set of people to our leadership. The diversity team will make recommendations on actions we can take going forward, both to increase diversity of IETF as a whole, and to help future NomComs (and other bodies selecting people) address issues of diversity in our leadership.

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 08:09:55 +0200

Jari,

this is great news.  A design team approach may be able to collect
information and generate ideas and actionable points in a way that
works much better than ranting on the IETF list.

The most important insight is that diversity is not a "problem" that
can be "fixed" by some set of measures, but a process that needs to be
ongoing.

Of course, that process can still be supported by specific measures,
and you have to have a diverse view to find out what might work.

I would like to pick two items here.  Both are not going to help for
all dimensions of diversity, or "fix the diversity problem", but it's
the small steps that will make a difference.  My items are:

-- Reducing situations that are perceived as hostile by members of
   specific groups.

-- Working on incentive structures that are useful for diverse groups.

Re hostility: I think most of us like to think they know what this
means for gender, ethnicity (but we sure can still get a lot better in
acting on that knowledge, and in increasing consciousness).  We are
not always very good at accommodating people with limited command of
the English language (yesterday's "Diana Raft" thing was great comic
relief here) -- keeping the process efficient is one thing, being
insensitive clods another.  Some groups think they know it all and
dismiss input from other groups in an aggressive way (folks:
"academic" is not a pejorative!).  I don't even know what other people
might perceive as hostile; that would be good input for the design
team.

Re incentives: Just an example that I happen to know about: academia
has a need for authorship recognition -- but that need is regularly
dismissed by people that come from different groups (in a way that
feels like utter contempt, back to the hostility point).  What can we
improve with respect to the incentive structures for other groups,
say, people from operators or from small businesses?  Again, something
that people from the various groups could contribute their thoughts
about toward the design team.

I'm not trying to make the design team the "diversity ombudsman", but
providing a somewhat sensitive and possibly confidential atmosphere
for offering thoughts like these might help.

Grüße, Carsten

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:30:56 -0700

> can be "fixed" by some set of measures, but a process that needs to be

+1

> -- Working on incentive structures that are useful for diverse groups.

Reference to 'diversity' often simplifies to some statistics about 
representation of various, identified groups, without considering the 
pragmatics (and effects) of having diversity. Lack of diversity is, as 
you note, considered a "problem" that is fixed by improving some 
statistics and reducing the group's range permissible topics.  This 
makes the group environment more restrictive, rather than richer.

Such discussions will make polite reference to the need for cultural 
sensitivities, and the like, but don't actually grapple with the 
pragmatics of changing the group culture.  Besides a basic sense of 
fairness, what sorts of group changes in behavior are we looking for? 
These can be cast as affirmative /improvements/ in the culture.

What I like most about your note is that it seeks to consider this 
question.  The term "diversity" is essentially about inputs to the 
group.  Your note suggests thinking about what I'll conveniently call 
outputs of the group -- outputs to itself...

If we combine this line of consideration with the need for statistical 
diversity, we can seriously talk about ways to adjust IETF culture to 
maintain what we like and need in the IETF, and remove what we find 
counter-productive.

>    I don't even know what other people

+1

We currently have a culture that is extraordinarily accepting of 
behaviors that are highly unprofessional, to the point of having chairs 
and area directors refusing to pursue ad hominem attacks.  An 
environment like that is particularly untenable to anyone from a culture 
that emphasizes politeness.

>     What can we
> say, people from operators or from small businesses?

I suppose the first requirement is to identify the groups we want to 
provide with better incentives.  You've cited academics and operators, 
of course.  Who else?

Then the question is to guess at the sorts of changes, either in /what/ 
we do, or /how/ we do it, that might constitute improved incentives.

d/

-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:35:37 -0700

Talk about timing!

This was in the very next message I looked at:

    How Internet Fighting Works

    http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2939#comic

d/