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 7:24 PM, Dhruv Dhody <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 6:09 PM, 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 also consider this as an issue, huge number of engineers are working for
> vendors in the emerging region.  Take Bangalore for an example all big
> vendors have big RnD centre out here but the number of regular IETF
> participation is still low.
>
> It is indeed harder to justify the travels to management sometimes, esp
> when dealing with project deadlines etc, The IETF regulars working for big
> vendors can take steps to change that mindset.
>
> There has been plans of mentoring in the IETF, vendors should do that
> internally and get some geographically dispersed, diverse participants to
> the IETF.
>

I agree with Dhruv. There are quite a few networking companies that have
offices in India. In my trips to the IETF, I have met with a few engineers
from Bangalore who are authoring drafts. It is an encouraging trend though
quite miniscule when compared with the headcount of these companies. The
major problems with many companies to send engineers to the IETF is
three-fold.

1. Many of the engineers are doing low-end work in the development
life-cycle such as maintainence. Many of these engineers are also junior
with less experience than some of the engineers from the US. So while they
may co-author the draft with someone from the US/Europe, the other authors
attend.

2. IETF meetings are expensive to travel to and attend. As many of the
India R&D centers are seen as cost centers, it becomes hard for management
to justify that expense. Doesn't help when you look at the overall expense
of attending the meeting is a significant percentage of what engineers get
paid in India. It doesn't help that out currency has lost > 10% of it's
value in the last few weeks Vs the dollar.

3. There is a general lack of awareness of IETF and ISOC activities.

We can't fix the 1st 2 easily but something can be done about the 3rd part.

-- Vinayak