Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On 19/04/2013 19:13, Ted Hardie wrote: As a working group chair, when I stare out at a sea of faces looking for a scribe, the chances of my asking someone I know produces good minutes is much higher than my asking someone whose work I don't know. Think about how this often works in WGs without a secretary or regular scribe. Chair says we need a volunteer for a scribe. Everyone looks away and sits on their hands. Chair says no scribe, no meeting. Everyone looks away and hangs their head even lower melting into the floor. Chair pleads a bit more. Silence. Chair asks someone they know since they are less likely to refuse. There maybe a refusal or two by people who expect to be at the mic a lot, or need to leave early, or are only there to catch up with their email. Eventually someone committed to the WG, and usually well known to the chairs, frequently a name called by the chair, offers to scribe in order to the meeting started. The strong temptation is to just ask one of the well known good scribes before the meeting in order not to waste time in a tight agenda. Stewart
RE: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Being a scribe can be a good way for people to know who you are (the scribe). From reading the thread on this, when you ask someone who is new, how about having them sit next to someone who is more familiar with the attendees to help with names? Maybe for those which English is not a first language, they could monitor the jabber list for questions. They may be more comfortable with certain aspects of volunteering during a session or reading drafts on their own time. It would be good to get the message out to newcomers that volunteering is important. You help others and they help you, it is basic networking skills and does work in the IETF. Thanks, Kathleen From: ietf-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:ietf-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Stewart Bryant Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 6:05 AM To: Ted Hardie Cc: IETF Subject: Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know On 19/04/2013 19:13, Ted Hardie wrote: As a working group chair, when I stare out at a sea of faces looking for a scribe, the chances of my asking someone I know produces good minutes is much higher than my asking someone whose work I don't know. Think about how this often works in WGs without a secretary or regular scribe. Chair says we need a volunteer for a scribe. Everyone looks away and sits on their hands. Chair says no scribe, no meeting. Everyone looks away and hangs their head even lower melting into the floor. Chair pleads a bit more. Silence. Chair asks someone they know since they are less likely to refuse. There maybe a refusal or two by people who expect to be at the mic a lot, or need to leave early, or are only there to catch up with their email. Eventually someone committed to the WG, and usually well known to the chairs, frequently a name called by the chair, offers to scribe in order to the meeting started. The strong temptation is to just ask one of the well known good scribes before the meeting in order not to waste time in a tight agenda. Stewart
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Moriarty, Kathleen kathleen.moria...@emc.com wrote: Being a scribe can be a good way for people to know who you are (the scribe). From reading the thread on this, when you ask someone who is new, how about having them sit next to someone who is more familiar with the attendees to help with names? Maybe for those which English is not a first language, they could monitor the jabber list for questions. They may be more comfortable with certain aspects of volunteering during a session or reading drafts on their own time. It would be good to get the message out to newcomers that volunteering is important. You help others and they help you, it is basic networking skills and does work in the IETF. I support this. Maybe some encouragement from the chair could help the newcomers in winning their natural shyness. I talk by personal experience here: maybe my shyness is a bit above average, but I think that when it is your first time in a new environment, it is only natural to be a little afraid of doing something wrong, even in something like IETF that I, as newcomer, found quite welcoming. Adding the pseudo-mentor to the scribe could also help and maybe also having two newcomer-scribes in parallel, so that each one knows that if s/he misses something or gets something wrong, the redundant scribe can be used to recover from the error. Thanks, Kathleen From: ietf-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:ietf-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Stewart Bryant Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 6:05 AM To: Ted Hardie Cc: IETF Subject: Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know On 19/04/2013 19:13, Ted Hardie wrote: As a working group chair, when I stare out at a sea of faces looking for a scribe, the chances of my asking someone I know produces good minutes is much higher than my asking someone whose work I don't know. Think about how this often works in WGs without a secretary or regular scribe. Chair says we need a volunteer for a scribe. Everyone looks away and sits on their hands. Chair says no scribe, no meeting. Everyone looks away and hangs their head even lower melting into the floor. Chair pleads a bit more. Silence. Chair asks someone they know since they are less likely to refuse. There maybe a refusal or two by people who expect to be at the mic a lot, or need to leave early, or are only there to catch up with their email. Eventually someone committed to the WG, and usually well known to the chairs, frequently a name called by the chair, offers to scribe in order to the meeting started. The strong temptation is to just ask one of the well known good scribes before the meeting in order not to waste time in a tight agenda. Stewart
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Hi Hector, Thanks for your input. I add that we/I need to write down these ideas (related to IETF Structure progress and IETF Diversity) into an I-D, because if not they can be forgotten. Restructuring is always an important task for old WGs/bodies. The community changes every day so organisations follow that change to interact with community. We need diversity not to increase goers or attendance, we need diversity in IETF to increase *participation* and *uses of standards* by the world community of Internet. AB From: Hector Santos hsantos at isdg.net To: Ted Hardie ted.ietf at gmail.com Cc: IETF ietf at ietf.org Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:12:40 -0400 http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78773.html
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On 4/19/2013 1:47 PM, Dave Cridland wrote: Nice post. I wonder whether a better mechanism for drawing newcomers into the inner circle - which is what I think you're intent is here - would be to randomly select people to be involved in a short online meeting to discuss the draft, rather than review it in isolation. It'd be a different kind of review, which adds value for us, I think, and would instantiate new human subnets which could be used to bootstrap other involvement. This is, I stress, merely a quick reaction to your much more thoughtful post, and I reserve the right to backtrack and change my mind. I'm replying to Dave's note, but read further through the thread. I'm not seeing the randomly-invite-to-review and randomly-invite-to-discuss being mutually exclusive. If I'm reading the mail threads on newcomer assimilation correctly, what we're hoping for is to identify people who we might not always identify, who can and will produce good work. The additional random selection gives people who we might not have identified a chance to show whether they can and will produce good work. I note that one of these possibilities places more emphasis on spoken English than the other. That's important to keep in mind. Maybe letting people self-select for the kind of review is helpful. Thanks, Spencer
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Excellent post, Ted. I really like your suggestions, and I think these are the types of things we should be doing to more widely leverage the talents of people who are available to participate in the IETF. Margaret On Apr 19, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Ted Hardie ted.i...@gmail.com wrote: Following a number of the threads on diversity and, in particular, on whether the effort to get a better demographic view of participation will lead to quotas, I have been increasingly uncomfortable with some of the arguments which appear to have some presumptions about how diversity and meritocracy relate. To describe the issue, I'd like to start with a different situation and then draw a parallel. The different situation I'd like to use is a startup company experiencing growth. In my experience, startups that succeed tend to have a very strong core group that comes together early on; they tackle the hard work and develop a great degree of understanding of and trust in each others' capabilities. As the company grows, it's very common for that core group to continue to rely on each other whenever a difficult problem arrives. That can manifest in those folks moving up to be the top of a hierarchy and individually handling delegation; it can also manifest itself in severe bottlenecks as the individuals remain critical resources to solve an increasingly large number of problems. In both cases, it's common for the individuals to pull in their own networks of trusted folks as support. Another way of expressing this is that a particular human network is the basis of an enterprise, and the scaling of that human network tends to work by each one of the humans pulling in additional folks from their personal networks whose skills are personally known to them. The result of that is that the start-up *is* a meritocracy as it grows (because the individuals are chosen based on their abilities), but its diversity is initially limited to that of the personal networks of those who end up in critical positions. As the company grows and recruiting becomes more formalized, the overall make-up may become more diverse, but key positions may remain less diverse as the human networks remain in place or are renewed. Note that the scope of this diversity may have nothing to do with race or gender, but may instead be about schools, disciplines, or ages. (When it's schools, we even get to reuse the phrase old boy network in its original sense). In the IETF, things are slightly different, in that attendance and participation are completely open (there's no hiring gate), but many of the same human networks are in play. As a working group chair, when I stare out at a sea of faces looking for a scribe, the chances of my asking someone I know produces good minutes is much higher than my asking someone whose work I don't know. But that also translates into the pool of candidates being *only those people I know*, because that's the only pool whose merits I have assessed. In other words, even though I'm selecting on merit (good note takers), the way in which merit is determined (personal knowledge) results in my not using the whole pool. If there were an objective measure I could use instead, the WG's pool of potential scribes would go up and the allocation likely would be fairer--if I could say: please tell me which potential minute taker (with a score of 70 or above) was tapped for the work least recently and then tap that individual, things get better for those who are otherwise tapped too often. Note again that the increased diversity in that pool may have nothing to do with race or gender or even age, but it might instead be in technical interest area (since I came from APPs into RAI, my background is focused in certain areas). The individual impact of my limited human networks may be small (I hope so, anyway); in the best case, the limitations of mine would be overcome by the scope of my co-chairs' and ADs'. But it can easily be a self-reinforcing instead; if all the chairs come from the same backgrounds, they may know and trust the same people. Those people likely are being selected for merit--but not from the total available pool. As folks worry about quotas and its impact on quality, I think we must recognize that the effort to promote based on merit alone is subject to the limits by which merits are assessed. The more human those are, the higher the likelihood that network limitations or cognitive bias will have an impact on our best use of the volunteers we have or could attack. So, given this very human problem, what can we do? Suresh and I happened to be at a different SDO meeting yesterday, and we sat down briefly and discussed this. Two things emerged as possible concrete actions from that brainstorming, but they both boil down to this: institutionalize methods for getting
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Dear Ted, I agree with you totally, hope that your suggestion is considered for progress in our participation (me as newcomer feedback). Our choices in life is all about awareness, I just wanted to add that any individual while *participation* with any body/person in or out IETF, s/he will try to evaluation that relationship and will gain experience/knowledge of such body reputation, then s/he will think could I trust the system for *my progress in participating*. For example, I was trying to get a chance to enter an old WG, but still difficult to be counted/acknowledged, I now decided to give my review of their work in IESG call by ignoring WGLC because of their reputation. Thanking you, Best Regards Abdussalam From: Ted Hardie ted.ietf at gmail.com To: IETF ietf at ietf.org Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:13:41 -0700 http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg78758.html
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On 4/19/2013 2:13 PM, Ted Hardie wrote: ... There are other methods that may well be better than the two Suresh and I discussed, but I put these forward as a potentially concrete step that may help those struggling with this to understand that the end result of this need not be quotas. It should be a better environment for all of our volunteers. best regards, Ted Hardie I call this improving the Electronic diversity of the IETF. It has communications tools but it needs more. There is work is in progress (MeetEcho and so on), but it still needs more. The IETF does not have a copyright on this problem. Every organizations has to improve its communications methods. Short list of ideas: - Better Marketing, Website Sales. - Focus on its products, standards, Publications of ideas, methods in a formal format, old and new technology reviews, Global Reviews, even legal topics, etc. - Online Forums to resolve the device independent issue - with continued Offline communications avenues. - Device independent Participation. - Memberships!!! Get that Professional Feel of getting a membership badge, great for resumes, - Different levels, - Give folks their own @IETF.ORG email address! - Offer Co-op projects (as opposed to jobs) for students (newcomers), - Management of projects, - Documentation experience, - Programmers for the developers of protocols, - Testers, - etc. There is much more that can be done, but we are still holding on to a version of the past that is keeping the IETF behind. We all fall in that trap of adhering to safe, conservative, comfortable and for the most part, working practices. I know I (my company) did and we are still trying to get out of that hole. In this way, its not a Start Up Plan that is needed. It would a Restructuring Plan. The IETF is not start up because it can't afford or has the leverage to start new things without harming others. In this way, it is currently Pareto Efficient because it does consider all things diverse. However, I believe we need to improve the Electronic Diversity by blending in the new things to the existing methods. I hope these discussions regarding diversity is not just about increasing IETF meetings attendance. Lastly, I think we need to remember that there are many folks who are not in this to be managers, leaders, RFC writers, or even complete Reviewers but just implementators and followers, including CTOs who would like nothing better but to get better abstracts and executive summaries from the flow of I-Ds submitted. They put their trust on their peers more involved with IETF to do the best engineering job and certainly not a result that will hurt them. This is where the IETF/IESG experiences is still and always vital, whatever is done, the IETF can not make her end products have a lesser quality. Its a tough task, but one that can be managed with improved Electronic Diversity. -- HLS
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On 4/20/13 6:12 AM, Hector Santos wrote: There is much more that can be done, but we are still holding on to a version of the past that is keeping the IETF behind. Behind what? Melinda
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
I like your analysis. A comment while I am still warm The first suggestion is a Newcomer's directorate. (snip) The second suggestion is a simple tool that at WG call time (be it last call or call for adoption) randomly selects a set number of participants from the mailing list, and then asks for a review or commentary. So 5 folks off the mailing list are directly asked for their opinion, without regard to preconceived notions of the chairs about who would be a good reviewer. If someone declines, the tool would select a new random person to fill out. The working group as a whole thus gets a chance to understand someone's technical viewpoint, without that person having to fit within one of the established human networks. I like the second approach since it seems simpler to implement and it does not involve a new human structure. Since we believe in running code, we could try the second approach and see how it works. We should fix the setup in advance (duration, metrics, ...), but you already know that. It seems to me that it would require just a handful of line of codes and little more. I would also suggest that with the second approach the selected reviewer could have been given a chance to say no, because sometime you could not have the time to do that. Of course, if someone says no too often, that already is a hint... ;-) Regards, Riccardo There are other methods that may well be better than the two Suresh and I discussed, but I put these forward as a potentially concrete step that may help those struggling with this to understand that the end result of this need not be quotas. It should be a better environment for all of our volunteers. best regards, Ted Hardie
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Hi Ted, interesting points indeed. I don't really know whether or not the approach you propose might work in practice, though. My personal experience in the IETF is that it is really hard to gain some 'popularity' among the members of this variegated gallery of characters, especially if you don't have any official sponsorship from one of the big Internet companies. In case you were able to earn some credibility with a couple of on-the-field successes, you would not be treated as a newcomer anymore, but nonetheless as an outsider, a sort of strange entity wandering around meeting corridors and looked at with some curiosity by the usual gang of famous IETFfers. It is a matter of social attitudes. People are strange when you're a stranger...and there is really little you can do about that. Cheers, Simon Il giorno 19/apr/2013, alle ore 20:13, Ted Hardie ha scritto: Following a number of the threads on diversity and, in particular, on whether the effort to get a better demographic view of participation will lead to quotas, I have been increasingly uncomfortable with some of the arguments which appear to have some presumptions about how diversity and meritocracy relate. To describe the issue, I'd like to start with a different situation and then draw a parallel. The different situation I'd like to use is a startup company experiencing growth. In my experience, startups that succeed tend to have a very strong core group that comes together early on; they tackle the hard work and develop a great degree of understanding of and trust in each others' capabilities. As the company grows, it's very common for that core group to continue to rely on each other whenever a difficult problem arrives. That can manifest in those folks moving up to be the top of a hierarchy and individually handling delegation; it can also manifest itself in severe bottlenecks as the individuals remain critical resources to solve an increasingly large number of problems. In both cases, it's common for the individuals to pull in their own networks of trusted folks as support. Another way of expressing this is that a particular human network is the basis of an enterprise, and the scaling of that human network tends to work by each one of the humans pulling in additional folks from their personal networks whose skills are personally known to them. The result of that is that the start-up *is* a meritocracy as it grows (because the individuals are chosen based on their abilities), but its diversity is initially limited to that of the personal networks of those who end up in critical positions. As the company grows and recruiting becomes more formalized, the overall make-up may become more diverse, but key positions may remain less diverse as the human networks remain in place or are renewed. Note that the scope of this diversity may have nothing to do with race or gender, but may instead be about schools, disciplines, or ages. (When it's schools, we even get to reuse the phrase old boy network in its original sense). In the IETF, things are slightly different, in that attendance and participation are completely open (there's no hiring gate), but many of the same human networks are in play. As a working group chair, when I stare out at a sea of faces looking for a scribe, the chances of my asking someone I know produces good minutes is much higher than my asking someone whose work I don't know. But that also translates into the pool of candidates being *only those people I know*, because that's the only pool whose merits I have assessed. In other words, even though I'm selecting on merit (good note takers), the way in which merit is determined (personal knowledge) results in my not using the whole pool. If there were an objective measure I could use instead, the WG's pool of potential scribes would go up and the allocation likely would be fairer--if I could say: please tell me which potential minute taker (with a score of 70 or above) was tapped for the work least recently and then tap that individual, things get better for those who are otherwise tapped too often. Note again that the increased diversity in that pool may have nothing to do with race or gender or even age, but it might instead be in technical interest area (since I came from APPs into RAI, my background is focused in certain areas). The individual impact of my limited human networks may be small (I hope so, anyway); in the best case, the limitations of mine would be overcome by the scope of my co-chairs' and ADs'. But it can easily be a self-reinforcing instead; if all the chairs come from the same backgrounds, they may know and trust the same people. Those people likely are being selected for merit--but not from the total available pool. As folks worry about quotas and its impact on quality, I think we must recognize that the
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Nice post. I wonder whether a better mechanism for drawing newcomers into the inner circle - which is what I think you're intent is here - would be to randomly select people to be involved in a short online meeting to discuss the draft, rather than review it in isolation. It'd be a different kind of review, which adds value for us, I think, and would instantiate new human subnets which could be used to bootstrap other involvement. This is, I stress, merely a quick reaction to your much more thoughtful post, and I reserve the right to backtrack and change my mind.
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 8:47 PM, Dave Cridland d...@cridland.net wrote: Nice post. I wonder whether a better mechanism for drawing newcomers into the inner circle - which is what I think you're intent is here - would be to randomly select people to be involved in a short online meeting to discuss the draft, rather than review it in isolation. It'd be a different kind of review, which adds value for us, I think, and would instantiate new human subnets which could be used to bootstrap other involvement. This is, I stress, merely a quick reaction to your much more thoughtful post, and I reserve the right to backtrack and change my mind. Another quick reaction or warm comment: Yes, it is a different type of review and maybe not everyone is suited for that type of interaction. I speak by personal experience: during meeting (especially with many people) usually I prefer to listen, think about the issues and maybe expressing my ideas in a follow-up or the at next meeting. I know, I am not a team player (rather, I am a lonely wolf :-) but it is me and I know that I am not the only one. I feel more comfortable in a less interactive setting: reading the document, taking my time to ponder about it, hunting for holes, etc. Then, maybe, I can be in a meeting where we express our opinion about the doc. Maybe we could have both types of forced interaction, so you could see who is more suited for live meeting and who for non-interactive review. Riccardo
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Hi Simon, On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Simon Pietro Romano sprom...@unina.itwrote: Hi Ted, interesting points indeed. I don't really know whether or not the approach you propose might work in practice, There is certainly a risk there, but I hope we can find ways of increasing the institutional support for opportunities for the less-well-connected (newcomer or not) to contribute to the technical work. That may not result immediately in deep social connection, but it should result in better visibility. That can help along the longer road. There are, after all, many chairs who are constantly looking for new participants and energy, and adding this tool may help match that to the skills of volunteers they don't know. regards, Ted Hardie though. My personal experience in the IETF is that it is really hard to gain some 'popularity' among the members of this variegated gallery of characters, especially if you don't have any official sponsorship from one of the big Internet companies. In case you were able to earn some credibility with a couple of on-the-field successes, you would not be treated as a newcomer anymore, but nonetheless as an outsider, a sort of strange entity wandering around meeting corridors and looked at with some curiosity by the usual gang of famous IETFfers. It is a matter of social attitudes. People are strange when you're a stranger...and there is really little you can do about that. Cheers, Simon Il giorno 19/apr/2013, alle ore 20:13, Ted Hardie ha scritto: Following a number of the threads on diversity and, in particular, on whether the effort to get a better demographic view of participation will lead to quotas, I have been increasingly uncomfortable with some of the arguments which appear to have some presumptions about how diversity and meritocracy relate. To describe the issue, I'd like to start with a different situation and then draw a parallel. The different situation I'd like to use is a startup company experiencing growth. In my experience, startups that succeed tend to have a very strong core group that comes together early on; they tackle the hard work and develop a great degree of understanding of and trust in each others' capabilities. As the company grows, it's very common for that core group to continue to rely on each other whenever a difficult problem arrives. That can manifest in those folks moving up to be the top of a hierarchy and individually handling delegation; it can also manifest itself in severe bottlenecks as the individuals remain critical resources to solve an increasingly large number of problems. In both cases, it's common for the individuals to pull in their own networks of trusted folks as support. Another way of expressing this is that a particular human network is the basis of an enterprise, and the scaling of that human network tends to work by each one of the humans pulling in additional folks from their personal networks whose skills are personally known to them. The result of that is that the start-up *is* a meritocracy as it grows (because the individuals are chosen based on their abilities), but its diversity is initially limited to that of the personal networks of those who end up in critical positions. As the company grows and recruiting becomes more formalized, the overall make-up may become more diverse, but key positions may remain less diverse as the human networks remain in place or are renewed. Note that the scope of this diversity may have nothing to do with race or gender, but may instead be about schools, disciplines, or ages. (When it's schools, we even get to reuse the phrase old boy network in its original sense). In the IETF, things are slightly different, in that attendance and participation are completely open (there's no hiring gate), but many of the same human networks are in play. As a working group chair, when I stare out at a sea of faces looking for a scribe, the chances of my asking someone I know produces good minutes is much higher than my asking someone whose work I don't know. But that also translates into the pool of candidates being *only those people I know*, because that's the only pool whose merits I have assessed. In other words, even though I'm selecting on merit (good note takers), the way in which merit is determined (personal knowledge) results in my not using the whole pool. If there were an objective measure I could use instead, the WG's pool of potential scribes would go up and the allocation likely would be fairer--if I could say: please tell me which potential minute taker (with a score of 70 or above) was tapped for the work least recently and then tap that individual, things get better for those who are otherwise tapped too often. Note again that the increased diversity in that pool may have nothing to do with race or gender or even age, but it might instead be in technical interest area
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Dave Cridland d...@cridland.net wrote: Nice post. I wonder whether a better mechanism for drawing newcomers into the inner circle - which is what I think you're intent is here - would be to randomly select people to be involved in a short online meeting to discuss the draft, rather than review it in isolation. It'd be a different kind of review, which adds value for us, I think, and would instantiate new human subnets which could be used to bootstrap other involvement. I think that would be a useful additional approach (maybe have those randomly selected meet online before starting the reviews). I do want to be sensitive, though, to the language barriers to some extent. I used to recommend that folks interested in participating in a working group start by being a scribe; I realized eventually how hard that was for some participants whose native language was not English. It's still useful for those for whom real-time capture of rapidly moving discussion is feasible, but we need something that allows folks time to reflect as well. Just my 2 cents, regards, TEd This is, I stress, merely a quick reaction to your much more thoughtful post, and I reserve the right to backtrack and change my mind.
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Riccardo Bernardini framefri...@gmail.com wrote: I like your analysis. A comment while I am still warm The first suggestion is a Newcomer's directorate. (snip) The second suggestion is a simple tool that at WG call time (be it last call or call for adoption) randomly selects a set number of participants from the mailing list, and then asks for a review or commentary. So 5 folks off the mailing list are directly asked for their opinion, without regard to preconceived notions of the chairs about who would be a good reviewer. If someone declines, the tool would select a new random person to fill out. The working group as a whole thus gets a chance to understand someone's technical viewpoint, without that person having to fit within one of the established human networks. I like the second approach since it seems simpler to implement and it does not involve a new human structure. Since we believe in running code, we could try the second approach and see how it works. We should fix the setup in advance (duration, metrics, ...), but you already know that. It seems to me that it would require just a handful of line of codes and little more. I believe Suresh is going to propose working on it at the next code sprint, if there is enough support. If you are interested in contributing to that, I'm sure he'd welcome it. regards, Ted Hardie I would also suggest that with the second approach the selected reviewer could have been given a chance to say no, because sometime you could not have the time to do that. Of course, if someone says no too often, that already is a hint... ;-) Regards, Riccardo There are other methods that may well be better than the two Suresh and I discussed, but I put these forward as a potentially concrete step that may help those struggling with this to understand that the end result of this need not be quotas. It should be a better environment for all of our volunteers. best regards, Ted Hardie
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
On Apr 19, 2013, at 10:31 PM, Ted Hardie ted.i...@gmail.commailto:ted.i...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Dave Cridland d...@cridland.netmailto:d...@cridland.net wrote: Nice post. I wonder whether a better mechanism for drawing newcomers into the inner circle - which is what I think you're intent is here - would be to randomly select people to be involved in a short online meeting to discuss the draft, rather than review it in isolation. It'd be a different kind of review, which adds value for us, I think, and would instantiate new human subnets which could be used to bootstrap other involvement. I think that would be a useful additional approach (maybe have those randomly selected meet online before starting the reviews). I do want to be sensitive, though, to the language barriers to some extent. I used to recommend that folks interested in participating in a working group start by being a scribe; I realized eventually how hard that was for some participants whose native language was not English. It's still useful for those for whom real-time capture of rapidly moving discussion is feasible, but we need something that allows folks time to reflect as well. I tried that a while back. I found that it's really hard for a newbie to scribe. First, you have people running to the mike, and no idea who they are. I tried to position myself just in front of the mike so I could see the name tags, but that worked less than half of the times (there was another mike at the back). People saying their names helps very little, because it's very hard to catch even for English speakers. Add some different accent, and it becomes hopeless. As chair, I try to pick the ones I know are familiar with those likely to come to the mike. Otherwise you end up with notes saying things like someone at the mic says … Yoav
Re: Meritocracy, diversity, and leaning on the people you know
Ted: Very nice post and good ideas. Thanks. Jari
