Re: Mired in history
One of the great plus points of modern standards development (and of open source development) is that you can't see the other people most of the time (unless they choose to show you their picture or video). So the idea that non-US voices (such as mine) or BAME voices (there are many) will not be heard is wrong. Plain text email has no gender or skin colour. It does, inevitably, convey an accent.
The IETF (like the W3C) uses English. Well, so does almost every international collaboration in science and technology. [Feel free to cite exceptions, but they are exceptions.] If you have an open source AI that can change this so that everybody can work in their preferred language, please let us know and I'm sure we'll adopt it. For now, we use English, much of it written by people who have learned it as a second language.
For an extraneous reason, the IETF hasn't held an in-person meeting since November 2019. It's worked remarkably well. Travel to meetings, and the heavy associated costs, have gone away for a while. Now's the time!
P.S.: since it was in 1986, I would guess that they were all white males
Wrong, as it happens. Lixia Zhang was there, and she was at IETF 111 last month.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
