Hi John,
At 10:43 04-05-2012, John C Klensin wrote:
garb on a regular basis is unreasonable. So, unless we want to
send the message that all of the senior members of the community
are necessarily male (and inclined to grow beards), we need to
find another term.
The term SIR was proposed instead of male and knighted.
IETF's sub-UI work. Until and unless that case is made, I think
we need to be absolutely sure that capable and promising women
have at least as much opportunity to make useful contributions
in the IETF --including taking on leadership roles-- as capable
and promising men. But, even a step or two in the direction of
There hasn't been any response to the gender note sent to another
IETF mailing list a few days ago. It's one thing to provide
opportunities for women; making it happen is another story. If you
or anyone else know anyone who is interested, I'll contribute.
Let me also make a suggestion that I hope is constructive: the
newcomers meet-and-greet may be really helpful in giving the new
people a chance to meet some of those they should be working
with. It would work better if a larger fraction of the
leadership sought out newcomers to talk with rather than
treating it as a pre-welcome-reception opportunity to talk with
each other, but I don't know how it fix that. However those
It has an air of formality. It's a constructive step though.
Currently, there's a two hour session for newcomers with around 65
slides. It's a lot of content, a lot of acronyms and a lot of rules
and sub-rules. There's also a two hour session about how to create
I-D at the same time. The newcomer has to choose between learning
about the IETF or learning how to create I-Ds. They then go into a
room full of strange people where it is a miss and hit affair like
Internet dating.
newcomer sessions don't --I suggest can't-- work for forming
mentoring relationships for two reasons. First, the people who
should be most available for mentoring are those with
significant IETF experience who do not have present WG Chair,
IESG, or IAB responsibilities. But those people are excluded
from the newcomers meet and greet sessions. Second, it is just
too early, especially since we, as a community, have little
control over who will be back the second and third time and the
second and third year. So I suggest we think about how to put
together 2nd-comer or 3rd-comer opportunities with potential
(and committed) mentors available and other attendance limited
to self-selected relatively new people (but normally not
first-timers) who are interested in that kind of experience and
support.
The 2nd-comer and 2rd-comer idea is interesting. There is free time
and free rooms on tutorial day. How about getting a room, get people
who are interested in there and send an informal invitation to the
attendees? You could even have affinity groups to avoid the old-boys
club atmosphere.
Regards,
-sm
