Re: [Gendispatch] Diversity and Inclusiveness in the IETF

[Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>]

Hello, Dominique,

On 23/2/21 05:18, Dominique Lazanski wrote:
> I would support Bron’s experience and also say that there are several 
> other barriers to entry that I’ve found. One is different approaches to 
> topics than the mainstream IETF approach held by most IETF attendees. I 
> am thinking about privacy/encryption, for example.

Could you elaborate a bit more on this one? e.g., some example (so that 
we can understand better what you mean)... and if you can think of 
anything that might be done to improve things in this respect, that 
would also be nice.



> But the other big 
> barrier to entry is the draft upload tools. For a new person attending 
> for the first time the tools are a relic of 1990 of thereabouts and can 
> be confusing and difficult.

FWIW, we have already started to work on a revision of the draft 
(working copy at: 
https://github.com/fgont/diversity/blob/main/draft-gont-diversity-analysis-01.txt), 
and this is what we currently have in the Section 8.2 of the upcoming rev:

---- cut here ----
8.2.  Difficulty in Authoring and Submitting Internet-Drafts

    There are so many formatting rules that an Internet-Draft (and
    eventually an RFC) needs to comply to, that in practice the only
    reasonable way create and submit an Internet-Draft is via the set of
    tools available at: https://tools.ietf.org/ . Tools such as xml2rfc
    are of a lot of help to produce documents that comply with the
    Internet-Draft formatting rules -- but its error messages might
    result cryptic to the unexperienced user.

    The number of tools has expanded so much that they probably deserve
    their own guidelines.  And existing guidelines such as
    [ID-Guidelines] should probably be updated with the assumption that
    Internet-Drafts will be produced with the set of available tools.

       This means that e.g. it becomes less important to the Internet-
       Draft author what formatting rules a document needs to comply to,
       since the existing tools will guarantee such compliance.  On the
       other hand, an author may benefit from guidelines on how to use
       the set of available tools.
---- cut here ----

Is there anything you'd suggest adding to it?


> In any case, I shall join the gendispatch group to discuss further!

Please do, but also feel free to discuss it here if you wish, too.

Thanks a lot!

Regards,
-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [e-mail]
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