Subject: The Open IETF

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2014 09:59:07 -0500

Posting as Some Guy Who's Subscribed To [email-masked], but not wearing any
particular hat.

On the subject of who we accommodate around here ...

If there's anything that distinguishes the IETF from other SDOs,  "being
insanely open" has to be a contender. We were pleasantly surprised that a
16-year-old in the Ukraine managed to author at least one RFC a few years
ago. We had no idea until we invited him to attend an IETF meeting, and mom
wouldn't let him leave the country alone. In the IETF, no one knows you're
a teenager, or a dog (tm), or a hamster, or a Texan ...

I'm told that a recent Nomcom interviewed one recent nominee using Skype
over dial up, because that's what the nominee had access to.

We often tell stories like these to national regulators, who are insisting
that the IETF is impenetrable for their Internet community, so they need to
hang around treaty organizations that also work on Internet technologies.

And I read this morning that 40 percent of households in Mississippi (a
state in the US) have no access to the Internet, as one data point, so
we're not just talking about some guy/gal in Africa.

The flip side of "connecting the next billion people to the Internet" is
that those people aren't connected today. And power/infrastructure is a
bigger problem than setting up a network for many of them.

We need to keep all of us in mind.

In my opinion, of course.

Spencer