Re: Diversity of candidates was Re: NomCom 2020 Announcement of Selections

[Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>]

Hi, Ben,

On 26/1/21 03:39, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
[....]
>>> I wanted to pull out this paragraph from Adrian's note and use it to
>>> make a suggestion:   Let's have the last 5 or so Nomcom chairs plus
>>> Andrew drag in the appropriate people from some of the larger companies
>>> and ask them to help us with our candidate diversity problem.
>>
>> Wouldn't "drag in the appropriate people from some of the larger
>> companies" actually be the wrong first step?
> 
> I think that "the appropriate people" was meant to refer to the managers
> that approve travel+time to attend/contribute to the IETF, not the people
> actually doing the contributing. 

But the end-result is the same: a biased sample: probably 30-40 
organizations from, say, 15 countries.

Although.., my comments were probably like putting the cart before the 
horse: The first question should be: what kind of diversity do you 
expect to achieve/improve?  Gender diversity from the same set of 
organizations and countries?

And, whatever the answer, why one or two particular axis of diversity 
are the (only) ones that matter?



> So the conversation might go something
> like "hi, we see you send a lot of smart people to the IETF; thank you!
> However, the IETF is looking at its diversity numbers, and it seems that
> the distribution of people you send to the IETF is different from your
> overall distribution of staff.  Can you think of ways to make the
> distribution of people you send to IETF more closely match your overall
> staff distribtion, so that the IETF in turn can more closely match the
> overall population?"

I might be wrong, but... I guess that whether that's part of how each 
manager manages their own people -- i.e., from their pov, they send what 
their consider the best people for the job based on availability, time 
and funding constraints, etc..  But, of course, I might be wrong.


Thanks,
-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [e-mail]
PGP Fingerprint: 6666 31C6 D484 63B2 8FB1 E3C4 AE25 0D55 1D4E 7492