Subject: Re: [iucg] Diversity of IETF Leadership

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:59:23 +0100

Margaret,

all this is correct and has only to do with the way the human brain
technology handles diversity.

This was enlighted by the findings of WG/IDNAbis and illustrated by RFC
5895 which, in an "unusal" approach, documents an internet
protocol outside of the internet, exemplifying the use of subsidiarity.
Actually, the success of the internet is based upon a three layered
unwanted arechitecture (because they lacked the money to fully implement
the Cyclades model of Louis Pouzin after visiting them). RFC 1122
describes the basic robustness. RFC 1958 completes it in documenting a
dump end to end core (what American males could financially afford by
then for a prototype), leaving smartness to fringe to fringe use (women
and foreigners), until the european web and IDNA, etc. tried to
compensate for the missing presentation layer. This has led to a
complicate architecture that RFC 3439 addressed in pleading for
simplicity.

Now the problem with diversity (brain diversity as well as cultural and
service ones) is that it is to be addressed at the fringe by
subsidiairity. This means that the core keeps control but loses command.
This is a transfer from a sun centric world to a cosmological one. The
RFC Editor is no more the center of the Internet world: every smart user,
including women (who think in a venusian way) and foreigners (who think
in an extraterestrial way) ones, becomes the center of her/his global
Internet. Welcome to the IUse (Intelligent Use) community !

More concerning, the official break of the IETF from the RFC 3935
Internet was on Jan 21st, with the publication of RFC 6852. There you
have to read "market" as
"Top-Secret-America-Information-Community", i.e. where
corporate money comes from. This not bad, nor good. This is a fact. We
IUse community also share many needs with them (stability, surety,
security, reliability, deployment, etc.) but we have more needs. As long
as these needs can be addressed in layers atop the TCP/IP layers
and  these layers are well documented, this is OK. The problems for
us are : (1) layer violations (and internationalization vs.
multilingualisation is a layer violation) we have to oppose, and (2)
readibility confusion - 7000 RFCs is too much. Some RFC keeping is on the
order. It is also expectable that average IETF women brains are younger
than average IETF men brains (just because they joined later on) and are
still less polluted by self-egoreferencing.

Cheers.

jfc

At 06:08 12/03/2013, Margaret Wasserman wrote:

On Mar 11, 2013, at 6:54 PM, Dan
Harkins
<[email-masked]>
wrote:

In other words, the
statement that gender and racial diversity in

groups makes them "smarter" has no basis in fact. Do you feel
that

an all-female group is stupider than a similarly sized group that is

equal parts male and female? Really?

Actually, Dan, there are well-regarded academic studies that show that
groups that contain women are smarter than all-male groups, regardless of
the relative intelligence of the group members.  Surprising,
perhaps, but true.  Here is a pointer to a discussion of one of
them:

http://www.antonioyon.com/group-intelligence-and-the-female-factor

There are also numerous studies, of various types, that show that
more diverse groups make better decisions and/or perform better than less
diverse groups.  Here is a description of one such study:

http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/better_decisions_through_diversity

So, as illogical as these statements may seem on the surface, they are
well-established facts.  Both of the articles I've sited give some
insight into why this is true.

Margaret