Re: How to get diversity of nominees was Re: Diversity of candidates was Re: NomCom 2020 Announcement of Selections

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 1/26/21 1:26 PM, STARK, BARBARA H wrote:

> IIRC, all the nominees were WG Chairs. This is generally considered an intermediary step towards the NomCom-appointed leadership positions. I strongly suspect (but don't feel incented to get real statistics) that the nominee pool diversity reasonably resembled WG Chair diversity, but that WG Chair diversity does not reflect attendee diversity.

If WG chairs tend to be people who have attended many in-person meetings 
and/or have actively participated in IETF for a few years, I wonder how 
much the diversity of WG chairs is affected by attendee churn which 
seems to be larger today than in the past. It's hardly surprising if ADs 
who appoint chairs want people experienced with IETF process (and 
consensus-based decision making in particular, since we rely on chairs 
to gauge consensus and sometimes to help build consensus within their 
WGs).  It would also not be surprising if participants would like to 
experience IETF before taking on the responsibility of chair.

So one thing I'm curious about is: how does IETF encourage more 
participants to be engaged in IETF in general, instead of only in the 
context of specific WGs?

Or to put it another way: how does IETF encourage more participation by 
people with broad and/or long-term interests in the Internet?

I wonder if the fee waivers can continue indefinitely even for in-person 
attendance, or if there can be fee reductions for f2f meetings.   Even 
if it's not feasible to reduce fees for everyone who cannot pay for 
in-person meetings, perhaps there could be reductions in fees from 
under-represented parts of the world? Perhaps other means of lowering 
the cost of attendance can be found?

Keith