USA dominion: Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Joe, *:

Here is how i think this whole effort is exclusionary: 

For the mayority of writers and even more so readers of IETF documents,
english is not the first language. Even for any non-american native english
speaker, i wonder how much they feel that there is a need to update the language
used by the IETF for what arguably is primarily a US social problem: Dealing with 
a still seemingly not well enough handled history of afro-american racism and slavery. 

This effort of language change if it is then adopted officially in IETF or RFC
editor will undoubtedly reconfirm the perception if not reality that the IETF
is a strongly USA dominated institution:

- IETF chair lives in USA works for USA company
- 12 of 14 IESG members live in the USA and/or work for USA companies.
- 10 out of 13 IAB members live in the USA and/or work for USA companies.
- Anybody want to take a bet what percentage of WG chairs live in the
  USA and/or work for a USA company ?
- Any of the other leadership roles ?

While in the past USA leadership was seen as very positive, unfortunately this
has changed around the world, and this effort has good chances to also be
seen in that light:

In this case, we have a situation where (if i analyze it correctly) not even 
the long-term IETF community, but one from outside the IETF brings this USA centric
social issue into the IETF, and the USA centric active IETF community is directly
jumping on this boat because they confuse whatever might be good for their
countries community to be equally good for the supposedly much larger 
and supposedly much more diverse and inclusive global IETF community. To me, this
is a sign of even stronger USA influence than anything technical we had so far.

IMHO this is NOT going to be perceived well in the worldwide IETF community,
instead, this will create more ridicule about bullish USA centric influence
and  control of the IETF. 

I for once learned a lot of network/software terminology from german language 
books using american terms. For all intent and purpose the mayority of the
worldwide IETF community  and even moree so the readers of IETF products (RFCs)
uses english ONLY as a technical language in a similar fashion. Why would
that community have to care about social issues in the USA in their
technical language ? Change english originated technical terms in maybe
a hundred foreign language books to match latest IETF documents ?
Retrain students all over the world about technical networking terms
and having to explain USA history in its wake ? And that going to play positive ??

How about we create an RFC-editor language advisory board: 10 people
selected at random from the active community, at most 2 first-language english
speakers, at most 2 first-language chinese speaker, at most one first-language
speaker for any other language. That would be a good starting point
to decide what does and what does not qualify as IETF community relevant
RFC language problems.

Otherwise, we could simply replace any english term we do not like as
americans with a french term for use in the IETF. They have a long history 
of trying to keep their own language freee of english influence, and AFAIK
they even have a government oversight board for such terminology, so i am
sure they will have a technical terms for anything we need and those
terms have been vetted professionally. Might even get lower hotel rates
next time in Quebec if we do this ;-)

Cheers
    Toerless

On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 01:35:37PM -0700, Joseph Touch wrote:
> On Jul 24, 2020, at 1:20 PM, Ole Troan <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > 
> > And you think this discussion isn???t exclusionary?
> > 
> > O. 
> 
> Just as ???free speech??? cannot include ???speech??? that restricts the speech of others, avoiding exclusionary language cannot avoid excluding those who consider that language appropriate.
> 
> If that???s what you mean. If not, it would be useful to explain.
> 
> Joe

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