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 11:55 PM, Fred Baker (fred) <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> On Jun 21, 2013, at 5:39 AM, S Moonesamy <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I can discuss this from a Cisco perspective, although of course not to be
> taken as a formal statement from the company. I will wonder what a general
> IETF question has to do with an IRTF RG, but I'll let that go.
>
> Cisco has about 450 buildings worldwide; a large cluster are in San Jose
> California, but we have engineering offices in Massachusetts, North
> Carolina, Texas, Ireland, Scotland, England, Holland, France, Switzerland,
> Israel, India, China, and Japan (and probably some other places I haven't
> thought of; this is off the top of my head). We don't think of them as
> being in, or not in, developing countries; we think of them as being the
> locations of engineering groups. If a given engineering group has need for
> standards work, that engineering group is on the hook to do it. If that
> means someone from Bangalore needs to attend an IETF meeting, someone from
> Bangalore needs to attend an IETF meeting.
>
> I'll give you one specific instance. I was asked to consider being a
> mentor for an ISOC Fellow that worked for Cisco in India. I contacted the
> guy, his manager, and Steve Conte, who manages Fellows for ISOC. I thought
> it was great that the guy wanted to attend, and I told him I would mentor
> him. But we get into an interesting problem with the fact that we send
> money to ISOC as a 501(c)3; we can't be seen as deriving benefit from that,
> and I could imagine an interesting audit outcome. I told the guy's manager
> that he needed to belly up to the travel expense. The guy came. We have had
> other engineers from Cisco in India attend as well.
>
> I think the question got no answer because it was malformed. The better
> question would be "do companies X, Y, and Z have engineering offices in
> developing countries and expect engineers there to be involved in standards
> work when appropriate?" The answer, from Cisco and I imagine from our
> competitors, would be "yes".


Interestingly of the two/three other Indians I met at Maastricht one was
mentored by Fred (Raj Singh / Cisco) and another by Lars (Varun Singh).
Thanks guys. The only other guy was a researcher from S. Korea whose mentor
was also a IETF contributor. Maybe some of you should chime in on the
mentorship thread on IETF mailing list.

-- Vinayak