Re: [ericas] Western, individualist conception of things (was: A suggestion for the Tao of the IETF)

[Vinayak Hegde <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 6:09 PM, S Moonesamy <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Richard,
> At 12:44 18-06-2013, Richard Barnes wrote:
>
>> Now, having finished that rant: I appreciate that the above is a pretty
>> Western, individualist conception of things.  I realize that for some other
>> people, official
>>
>
> I was thinking about the Western, individualist conception of things
> mentioned above.  I was part of the Applications Area Review Team.  When I
> took over the team was not performing any reviews.  After about a year the
> team performed all the reviews it was assigned.  The Security Directorate
> has an 80% rate.   The team did 100%.  I asked the Area Directors to create
> a directorate.  They immediately said yes.
>
> I looked up the membership of a few other directorates today and noticed
> that there wasn't anyone from China or Japan.  I went to one meeting and I
> was able to find people from Asia and emerging regions to volunteer for
> IETF work.
>

Well I wouldn't blame anyone for this. It is hard to get volunteers for any
directorate. I am part of the performance directorate. It has been really
hard to recruit volunteers for this group (yes some of the work is niche -
which doesn't help). We have a lot of pending reviews and the same faces
have been raising hands for a couple of years when doing reviews. Let me
know if there are any good strategies to overcome this.

I saw someone from an emerging region having a difficult time in a working
> group.  Only one person stepped forward to help him.
>
> I had a chat with someone from an open source project.  The person said to
> someone: "I would like you to come to our event, don't worry about money as
> we'll see about that".  I have not heard people from the IETF saying that.
>  There was a recent thread about "stuck getting visas".  I didn't see
> people from the IETF saying "don't worry we can see about that".
>

Again, there is only so much that the IETF can do about this honestly. IMHO
IETF does a decent job at this with letters of invitation and other stuff.
I have never had any issues with the IETF for this.

That said, I have done a bit of travelling myself. Many people from the
western world do not have any idea about the amount of pain one has to go
through for something they take for granted (or even bother). Just ask
someone young from a developing country who has applied for a visa to the
US / Europe (Schengen). Last year, my company submitted almost 250 pages of
documentation to get a single entry visa. I just applied for the Schengen
visa to Berlin, Germany. It took me 3 days to get all the documents
necessary to get the visa. I will know soon if I am flying. And I have to
do this every year for every meeting that I attend. The US visa is painful
but atleast you get a longer duration easily not so with Europe. I spent
around $120 overall (other than time) for the visa.

Humberto asked the following question: "If there is anybody in this mail
> list from big vendors like Juniper, Cisco, Extreme, and others, please let
> me know what you have done to stimulate your engineers from emerging
> countries to get involved with IETF".  There wasn't any reply.  There was a
> similar question on the IETF discussion mailing list.  There wasn't any
> answer to it.
>

Honestly there are a lot of armchair revolutionaries on the main IETF
mailing list, who like to pontificate from the pulpit. Sad but true.

-- Vinayak