I have an update relating to the diversity discussions we've had on the list and at IETF-86. I promised that I'd set up a design team. I have found two people to lead such a design team: Kathleen Moriarty and Suresh Krishnan. Thank you volunteering to lead this!

Please contact them if you are interested in contributing to the work. I have given them an open assignment, with a desire to get advice on what steps we could take to increase participation in various aspects of the IETF, hoping for some initial advice before the next IETF. The leaders will determine how they want to run the team and who to select to it, but the writeup below is my input for setting the stage and some scope for the work. The design team will present their recommendations to the community, and engage in the discussion. Recommendations with community support will be taken forward. The creation of this team should not stop other efforts or proposals from going forward. For instance, there is an independent effort in looking at improvements in mentoring.

Jari Arkko

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For the purposes of this team, we think of diversity as something that covers international participation, different cultures, gender, age, organisational background, and so on. While the IETF has become a very international organisation (with participants from 60 countries working on documents, for instance), there are many aspects of diversity where we could do much better. Overall participation is concentrated in some areas of the world, with little participation from Africa and South America, for instance. Similarly, while the IETF has some very active female participants and leadership members, the numbers are very small. Much of the work in the IETF is driven by large networking companies, yet academia and small companies would have more to give, and operational experience from additional operators would be similarly appreciated. Importantly, these disparities appear most prominently in our leadership, where institutional and structural issues can lead to even less diversity along all of the above mentioned axes than in our general population. All organisations benefit from a healthy influx of new participants at all levels, and in the IETF we need that to balance our well-established topics and participants, to build the next generation technologies, experts, and leaders.

These issues are of course related to general engineering and industry issues, and are a source of discussions in other similar organisations. But we should not attempt to show how we match or do not match the general patterns. We should rather just make the observation that additional diversity would be beneficial to IETF and improve its results.

The diversity team is a design team tasked with understanding the issues we are facing, drawing in experience from other organizations affected by similar issues, identifying obstacles to us having the widest breadth of talented participants and leaders, and making practical recommendations that could help us improve the situation. It is understood that many improvements may only take effect long-term, such as drawing in more participants from areas of the world where the IETF has traditionally not had much participation. Nevertheless, a set of actionable steps would be useful.

The diversity team is not charged with evaluating the particulars of current or past Nominations Committee (Nomcom) decisions, and any discussion of ongoing NomCom activities is out of scope. The NomCom is expected to continue to do its utmost to recruit and appoint a top-notch and well-rounded set of people to our leadership. The diversity team will make recommendations on actions we can take going forward, both to increase diversity of IETF as a whole, and to help future NomComs (and other bodies selecting people) address issues of diversity in our leadership.