As you may be aware, the IETF currently optionally asks participants to identify their gender during the meeting registration process and in anonymous surveys, but not at any other time. There is no gender field in Datatracker. Currently, the data collected during meeting registration is not recorded alongside the registration record but held separately and privately, and is intended to be used solely for aggregate statistics on a per-meeting basis. This mechanism and usage is in line with a decision [1] from the predecessor of the IETF LLC. However, in practice this data is rarely used and is not used on the meeting statistics dashboard page [2].
There are some key limitations with this current data collection that we seek to address: * When a registration is cancelled, as happens more frequently now, we are unable to correct the collected gender data rendering it of unknown quality. * We are unable to use the data for any longitudinal analysis, such as repeat attendance, or tracking the progress of IETF participants and their experiences by gender. This latter data is something that some in the Systers Program [3] have asked for. * We are unable to easily identify women participating in meetings in order to inform them about Systers or other programs/events specifically for women. * There is a gap in providing other features related to gender, that are increasingly desired by participants, such as indicating preferred pronouns. Currently in-person meeting participants can only do this by manually placing stickers on meeting badges and remote participants can only do this in email signatures. There are two related questions here that we have looked at: 1. How are participants able to optionally and privately share their gender with the IETF for contact and/or data analysis purposes? We have considered adding an optional private gender field to Datatracker, but currently the only private data in Datatracker are the passwords while the rest of the database is freely available to download. Adding support for private data in Datatracker would require a significant cultural change as the Datatracker is designed with transparency in mind. Revising that would require considerable change to the processes for data management, in order to prevent the leakage of private personal data. This is therefore something we think is best left to a broader discussion in the tools context. For that reason, we propose instead to change the registration system so that the optional gender data provided stays associated with the record, is not made public, but is now used by the LLC and Secretariat for both contact and the type of analysis outlined above. The registration system is developed and maintained by the Secretariat and it already has private data. 2. How are participants optionally and publicly able to share either their gender or preferred pronouns? We considered adding an optional public field for gender to Datatracker or the registration system or both, but decided against this because having both a public and private gender field, even though they would be in different systems, is likely to be confusing and lead to people inadvertently sharing personal data. We propose adding a public field for preferred pronouns to Datatracker, which can be updated at meeting registration time via the registration system. We will then ask Meetecho to display this next to a person’s name, if filled in. The IETF LLC would like your views on this by Monday 23 May, sent to either admin-disc...@ietf.org or to me directly at exec-direc...@ietf.org [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/bzL2QHgRAosd1KXFI7BY9vJM5fU/ [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/stats/meeting/overview/ [3] https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/ietf-systers/ -- Jay Daley IETF Executive Director exec-direc...@ietf.org _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce mailing list IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
