RE: [Gendispatch] Diversity and Inclusiveness in the IETF

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

Hi Vittorio,

I also want people with hands-on experience in leadership. In general, I wanted to raise the importance of skills in this discussion. For some reason it seems to have gotten lost. You added even more requirements below, which I am also fine with.

From my experience in the IAB I must say it is not so easy to attract the regulatory community and economist. We had some success with the former category simply because some IETF people ended up working in the regulatory space and some of the working groups had pretty strong ties to the regulatory space (e.g. emergency services, privacy, telecommunications). Henning Schulzrinne, for example, worked for the FCC and shared his experience at IAB plenaries. We also tried to involve economists and the work by Eliot needs to be mentioned, see https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/itat/. I am not sure where this effort ended up.

Would I like to see a guy like Henning with his IETF / FCC experience in the IETF leadership. Definitely. Would he want to do that? Most likely not.

Ciao
Hannes

From: Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2021 10:40 AM
To: Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>
Cc: GENDISPATCH List <[e-mail]>; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [Gendispatch] Diversity and Inclusiveness in the IETF


Il 24/02/2021 08:22 Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> ha scritto:

The culture of hands-on work needs to be more than a responsibility of the document authors. It is a culture that has to cut across the organization, from working group chairs to the IESG. Currently, there are disincentives to work on code as a document author.
I want people with hands-on experience in the leadership of an engineering organization. For me this is a form of diversity.
The question is whether you *only* (mostly) want coders in the leadership, or whether you *also* want coders in the leadership. This makes a lot of difference in evaluating your position.

Coming from my own IETF experience, which of course is just about a small subset of everything that is happening here, I'd say that the IETF has the opposite problem - the IETF does not seem to have a way, or even the desire, to acquire non-technical perspectives on what it is doing, so whenever a new protocol ends up prompting significant regulatory, business or social changes, they seem to come unexpectedly; the non-technical stakeholders that were not involved in the design phase get mad at the IETF, and the people at the IETF are surprised (sometimes even offended) by that reaction. And then you get a debate on whether code is law or not and whether the socio-economic implications of new technologies have to be considered by the technologists, which I thought we had closed forever at the turn of the century.

(But sorry, possibly this is not a discussion in topic for gendispatch - it is more for a new WG on diversity and inclusiveness ;-) )

--

Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy

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