RE: NomCom 2020 Announcement of Selections

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi Julien,
At 06:34 AM 28-01-2021, Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia - FR/Paris-Saclay) wrote:
>Generally agree with Fernando, but I would like to focus on a 
>different take : there is a danger to focus on "diversity" for its 
>own sake, and people tend to hang their particular view of diversity 
>there (race, gender, country, religion, sexual orientation...). 
>Picking the "right" type of diversity will always create some form 
>of bias, there will always be unhappy people and it's not clear we 
>can find a "satisfactory" (set of) axis.

The following is from the IETF web site: "IETF standards are built on 
the combined engineering judgement of participants, including 
individuals from academia and network operators, router vendors and 
open source projects".   There are nomination committee appointments 
to entities where non-engineering expertise is sought, e.g. the IETF 
Administration LLC.  If the appointments, viewed as a whole, are 
undiverse, the organization would not look international.  I doubt 
that it would be possible to devise criteria which would be 
satisfactory to everyone.  It is usually left to the members of the 
nomination committee to decide whether to consider that aspect in 
making their selections/appointments.

I took a quick look at the current composition of the LLC.  A 
majority of its directors are from one region.  Are there people with 
the relevant expertise from other regions interested in volunteering 
for that position?  Why didn't they apply for the position?

The above is also applicable for Area Directors.

The previous diversity effort was focused on the male/female 
ratio.  It is unlikely that the outsourced effort to increase 
regional diversity was successful given the nomination committee 
appointments.  Diversity might be a difficult problem to address.  It 
is better to give up on addressing the diversity issue(s) instead of 
seeing meaningless statements from the IESG about it.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy