Re: PROPOSED GUIDELINE: balance

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

Howdy Leslie,

Brian's parenthetical remark about being at the end of PILC pipe is a
diversity claim. Now I suspect there's more to this diversity than the
latency/bandwidth of a trans-oceanic hop -- his connectivity within a
region (the UK), and protocols used (Coloured Book, JANET), other bits
of local interoperability.

Now if all that came out of the working groups that the IESG and IAB
add value to, either in managerial roles, or even in roles of technical 
contribution, were PILCish sorts of stuff -- fat pipes, skinny pipes,
address table lookups [1] -- shuffling streams of blind octets, then the
breadth of view could be met by core router and modum vendors, but they'd
all be vendors. Or backbone operators and wee little ISPs, but they'd
all be service providers. Or ...

Someone most of us know wrote to me recently and incidently lamented how
little money has gone into research in the last decade. 

Al Mandel is a friend of mine, and he is currently serving as Tribal Chair
of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Nation. He wrote to me asking what I know about
wireless, as his Tribe receieved a TOP grant from the US DOC to establish
a broadband wireless network on the reservation. 

He's at the end of an interesting latency/bandwidth hop too.

Breadth of view may mean more than a trans-oceanic backbone cabal [2].

But not everything we (collectively) do is shuffling streams of blind octets,
we look at an awful lot of them. You wrote rfc2825, so this isn't news to you. 

So I was in China twice last year, and I learned:
	o China is smaller than MIT, or BBN or ... in fact, most of China can
	  be made to fit in either the San Jose or San Francisco convention
	  centers -- where I used to build InterOp shownets for the good
	  company and fine toys, in ipv4 addr allocation terms,
	o Every instance of IE in China attempts to send packets to Redmond,
	  and Redwood City, causing overseas bandwidth consumption,
	o Every instance of IE in China is also broken when a UTF-8 encoded
	  character is processed in as part of a URI, also causing (see above),
	o traceroutes between any two points involves a 0.5 second delay
	  a lot more frequently than I've become used to since the CMU
	  outage in December 1988 and we all had to go vertical (MIT-SRI or
	  BBN-ISI)
	o something about the DNS, that we're now all certain I simply got
	  dead wrong.
If I'd stayed there any longer, maybe I'd have learned more.

Well, I've written enough. If, at the end, is it as Brian put it, it is
	"skill & experience in international aspects of the Internet"
then either its some PILCish S&E the nomcom could be seeking, or it is some
"international" thingee the nomcom could be seeking. In either case, IMHO,
both Al out at Pyramid Lake, and quite a few people in Beijing have the same,
or better, breadth of view value as a hypothetical mid-Atlantic person, and
it is possible that the absence of their contribution to the IAB and IESG is
not hypothetical at all.

If I haven't been completely clear, I don't see any reason not to request
the nomcom attempt to prefer qualified women over equally qualified men,
and qualified Asians over equally qualified Europeans and Americans. It is
difficult to imagine who would be worse off by being serious about breadth
of view.

Thanks for the long note Ted.

Eric

[1] Sung to the tune of the Armour Hotdog jingle
	"Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on ricks,
	 tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chicken pox
	 love hotdogs, Armour hot dogs, the dogs kids love to bite."

[1] Appologies to Erik Fair and others who _are_ The BackBone Cabal (tm).