RFC 7704

An IETF with Much Diversity and Professional Conduct

📅 published November 2015, from ietf

RFC 7704: An IETF with Much Diversity and Professional Conduct 🎀

Okay bestie, this is RFC 7704 💖 It's an Independent Submission, so it came in outside the usual standards track. It's written by D. Crocker (Brandenburg InternetWorking) and N. Clark (Pavonis Consulting) ✨ The category is Informational (so NOT a standard, just sharing thoughts 🦋), the ISSN is 2070-1721, and the date is November 2015. It doesn't list anything it obsoletes or updates, so it's a standalone vibe 💅

Abstract

Okay so the Internet's technologies came out of a culture of open participation and diverse collaboration, and honestly? That culture has been strikingly efficient and effective 🔥 It's super distinctive compared to other standards organizations. In the IETF's early days and its antecedent, the people showing up were almost entirely a small group of well-funded, American, white, male technicians 🙈 That created a really distinctive and challenging group dynamic, both in management and in how people treated each other. In the IETF, the interaction style can often be singularly aggressive, often with a singularly hostile tone and content 💀

Groups with greater diversity make better decisions ✨ But getting meaningful diversity takes more than generic good will and nice statements of principle. Lots of different behaviors can reduce participant diversity or participation diversity. This document talks about IETF participation through the nature of diversity and the practical issues that can increase or decrease it 🌸 It represents the authors' assessments and recommendations, following general discussions of the issues in the IETF.

Status of This Memo

Heads up: this document is NOT an Internet Standards Track specification 🙅‍♀️ It's published for informational purposes only 🧚

This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other RFC stream. The RFC Editor chose to publish it at their discretion, and they make no statement about its value for implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard. See Section 2 of RFC 5741 for the details 📚

Info about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to give feedback on it can be found at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7704 🦋

Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved 💜

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) as in effect on the date of publication. Please read these carefully, because they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document 🫶

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Concerns  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     2.1.  Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     2.2.  Harassment and Bullying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   3.  Constructive Participation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     3.1.  Access  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
     3.2.  Engagement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     3.3.  Facilitation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     3.4.  Balance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  12
     3.5.  IETF Track Record . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
     3.6.  Avoiding Distraction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13
   4.  Responses to Unconstructive Participation . . . . . . . . . .  14
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
   6.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     6.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
     6.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15
   Acknowledgements . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18

1. Introduction ✨

This doc is all about IETF participation, through the lens of diversity and the practical issues that can make it go up or down 📈 The topic has gotten recent discussion in the IETF. The authors wrote their assessments and recommendations because they genuinely believe it's constructive for the IETF, and that it lines up with at least some of the IETF community's participants 💅

The Internet Engineering Task Force [IETF] grew out of a research effort that started in the late 1960s 🛰️ It was centrally funded by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) and used a bunch of research sites around the United States, with some participation from groups in the US military. At first, only members of the funded research groups could take part. In the 1980s, participation expanded to include projects funded by other agencies, most notably the US National Science Foundation for its NSFNet effort 🌈 Around when the IETF was created in its current form, in the late 1980s, the group became fully open. Anyone could attend, no matter their funding, affiliation, country of origin, or anything like that 🫶

Like, the tech we use today is obviously amazing, but the real flex is the culture behind it 🔥 Open participation and diverse collaboration made the process strikingly efficient and effective, and it's still distinctive among standards organizations. That culture has held up through lots of changes in who participates, how organizations are structured, economic cycles, and formal processes. BUT, keeping the IETF working well takes constant vigilance 👀 As new people join the mix, it's getting easier for the IETF to slowly borrow models from other environments. Those models are more established and familiar, but they're often less effective.

Historically, the people taking part in the IETF and its antecedent were almost entirely a small group of well-funded, American, white, male technicians 💜 No matter what anyone intended, a narrow demographic like that created a distinctive group dynamic, both in management and in personal interactions, and it has persisted into the current IETF. Aggressive and even hostile discussion behavior is pretty common 😭 When it comes to management, the IETF can be significantly in-bred, favoring the selection of people who are already well-known. Sure, the pool of candidates suffers from the classic diversity limitations found in lots of engineering environments. Still, there's evidence and a perception of selection bias beyond that 👑

In the IETF, the style of interaction can often be singularly aggressive, including a singularly hostile tone and content 🥴 In most professional venues, that behavior is considered highly unprofessional, or worse. Within the IETF, though, it's had long-standing tolerance. If someone criticizes a person's hostility, the reply is often "that's just the way they are," or "someone else provoked it," or "the person is generally well-intentioned." Even worse, anyone who raises concern about the behavior is typically told to be less sensitive. So if you're the recipient of an attack and you complain, you're often criticized or dismissed instead 💀

As the IETF opened its doors to participation by anyone, its demographics predictably moved toward much greater variety 🌸 But the group culture hasn't adapted to those changes. The aggressive debating style and the tolerance for personal attacks can be extremely off-putting for participants from more polite cultures 🙅‍♀️ And the management selection processes can tend to exclude some constituencies inappropriately.

Recently, members of an informal IETF women's interest group, called "systers," ran a quiet experiment 🧪 They put forward a large number of women candidates for management positions through the IETF's "NomCom" process. NomCom is itself a potentially diverse group of IETF participants, chosen at random from a pool of recent meeting attendees who offer their services. So its problematic choices (or rather, its omissions) could be seen as reflecting IETF culture generally 🫠

Over the years, some women have been chosen for IETF positions as authors, working group chairs, area directors, Internet Architecture Board [IAB] members, and IETF Administrative Oversight Committee [IAOC] members 🎀 However, the results of the systers experiment were NOT encouraging. Even though they recruited a disproportionately high number of female candidates, not a single one was selected. Any one candidate might be rejected for entirely legitimate reasons, but a pattern of rejection this consistent suggested an organizational bias 😬 The results were presented at an IETF plenary, and they sparked significant IETF soul-searching. They also led to the creation of a group to consider diversity issues for the IETF [Div-DT] [Div-Discuss] 🦋

Other activities around that same time also got the IETF thinking about unacceptable behaviors, generally classed as harassment. That led the IESG to issue a formal IETF anti-harassment policy [Anti-Harass] 🙌

Changing an organization's culture is hard, and it takes more than commitment to the underlying principles. It also takes vigilant, sustained effort 💪 The IESG has taken essential first steps. What's needed now is going beyond position papers and expressions of ideals, into continuing education of the entire community, and an immediate and substantive response to unacceptable behaviors 🔥

2. Concerns 💅

2.1. Diversity 💖

okay bestie, let's talk diversity 🦋 Diversity is about how much a group's composition varies, and it can literally touch EVERY participant attribute, no cap. That covers task stuff like knowledge and experience, plus the usual "identified class" attributes like race, creed, color, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. It also stretches to beliefs, behaviors, experiences, preferences, and economic status. It's giving everything 💅

The factors that make a group's decisions good are complex and subtle, and you can't pin them down with a precise spec 🌸 But in broad terms, groups with greater diversity make better decisions [Kellogg]. They perform better at diverse tasks, both in quantity and quality, and a ton of research found that heterogeneity often acts as a conduit for ideas and innovation [WiseCrowd] [Horowitz] [Stahl] [Joshi] ✨ Like, one person's implicit assumptions might not even be on another person's radar, and some people might not even know about them. Different participants can also bring different bases of knowledge and different styles of analysis. People with the same background and experience will all too readily bring the same ideas forward and analyze them the same way, so fewer new ideas and methods pop up, and underlying problems don't get noticed 🙈

Careful though! Wanting to be super diligent about diversity often turns into mechanical, statistical box-ticking to make sure every identified constituency is represented. For smaller populations like the IETF, and especially its small management teams, that's counterproductive 💀 First, you can't identify every single constituency that might matter. Second, the group size doesn't allow representation by every group. So in practical terms, legit representation of diversity only needs meaningful variety, not slavish bookkeeping 🎀 Also, without care, it can cause the negative effects of diversity, where decision-making slows down, interaction drops, and conflict goes up [Horowitz].

So, pragmatically, concern for diversity just requires serious attention to two requirements:

  • Participant Diversity: Decisions about who gets into the group need to make sure the selection process encourages varying attributes among members. Basically, this is about variety in group demographics.
  • Participation Diversity: Generating ideas and reviews well within a group needs discussions that encourage constructive participation by all members, and the views of each member have to be considered seriously. This one is all about group dynamics 🧚

In other words, look for real variety in group composition AND real variety in participant discussion. That's how you find a greater variety of possible and practical solutions 🌈

Getting meaningful diversity takes more than generic good will and statements of principle 🫶 The challenges here are to actively:

  • Encourage constructive diversity
  • Work to avoid group dynamics that reduce diversity
  • Work to avoid group dynamics that diminish the benefits of diversity
  • Remove those dynamics when they still occur

It also takes education about the practicalities of diversity in an open engineering environment, and organizational processes that regularly consider what effect each decision might have on diversity.

Examples abound (there are SO many, lol) 👑

  • Formally, an IETF working group makes its decisions on its mailing list. Since anyone can join the list, anyone with access to the Internet can participate. However, working groups also have sessions at the thrice-annual IETF face-to-face meetings and might also hold interim meetings, which are face to face, by telephone, or by video conference. Attendance at these can be really challenging 😭 Getting to a face-to-face meeting costs a great deal of money and time, and remote participation often incurs time-shifting that includes very early or very late hours. So increased working group reliance on meetings tends to exclude people with less funding, less travel time, or more structured work schedules.
  • Vigorous advocacy for a strongly held technical preference is super common in engineering communities. Of course it can be healthy, since strong support is necessary to promote success of the work. However, in the IETF this can show up in two problematic ways. One is a personal style that's overly aggressive and serves to intimidate, and hence unreasonably gag, people with other views. The other is a group style that prematurely embraces a choice and doesn't permit a fair hearing for alternatives.
  • Predictably, engineers value engineering skills. When the task is engineering, that's entirely appropriate. However, many of the IETF's activities that support its engineering efforts are less about engineering and more about human and organizational processes. Those need very different skills. To the extent participants in those processes are primarily considered in terms of their engineering prowess, people who are stronger in other relevant skills get undervalued, and the diversity of expertise the IETF needs gets lost 🥺
  • IETF standards are meant to be read, understood, and implemented by people who were not part of the working group process. The gist also often needs to be read by managers and operators who are not engineers. IETF specifications enjoy quite a bit of stylistic freedom to contain pedagogy, in the service of these audience goals. However, the additional effort to be instructional is significant, and active participants who already understand and embrace the technical details often decline to make that effort. Worse, that effort is also needed during the specification development effort, since many participants might lack the background or superior insight needed to appreciate what is being specified. Yet the IETF's mantra for "rough consensus" is exactly about the need to recruit support. In fact, the process of "educating" others often uncovers issues that have been missed ✨

2.2. Harassment and Bullying 🫶

okay so, there are SO many behaviors that can make the group less diverse 😭 Some of them are about who shows up (participant diversity), and some are about who actually speaks up (participation diversity). One big category is overt stuff meant to push certain people out by scaring them into silence or getting them to leave. 🙅‍♀️ Intimidation actually comes in two flavors that are worth telling apart.

First up is harassment, which is biased treatment of demographic classes. A bunch of those classes are protected by law, and the community has been getting way better at understanding that biased behavior like this can't be tolerated. 🌈

The second flavor is intimidation aimed at specific individuals. That's usually labeled bullying [Har-Bul] [Workplace] [Signs] [Escalated] [Prevention]. Honestly, how much bullying happens at work is wildly underestimated, misunderstood, and mishandled 💀 A WikiHow article [wikiHow] describes it like this:

...[B]ehavior directed at an employee that is intended to degrade, humiliate, embarrass, or otherwise undermine their performance... [T]he sure signs of a bully that signify more than a simple misunderstanding or personal disagreement... might include:
  • Shouting, whether in private, in front of colleagues, or in front of customers
  • Name-calling
  • Belittling or disrespectful comments
  • Excessive monitoring, criticizing, or nitpicking someone's work
  • Deliberately overloading someone with work
  • Undermining someone's work by setting them up to fail
  • Purposefully withholding information needed to perform a job efficiently
  • Actively excluding someone from normal workplace/staff room conversations and making someone feel unwelcome

And the Tim Field Foundation [Bully-Ser] lists the traits of a "serial bully" (paraphrased here, so this is the vibe, not a direct quote) 👀

  • Jekyll and Hyde nature -- Dr Jekyll is 'charming' and 'charismatic'; 'Hyde' is 'evil'
  • Exploits the trust and needs of organizations and individuals, for personal gain
  • Convincing liar -- Makes up anything to fit their needs at that moment
  • Damages the health and reputations of organizations and individuals
  • Reacts to criticism with Denial, Retaliation, Feigned Victimhood [Defensive], [MB-Misuse]
  • Blames victims
  • Apparently immune from disciplinary action
  • Moves to a new target when the present one burns out

Whether it's aimed at classes or at individuals, intimidation can:

  • Seem relatively passive, such as consistently ignoring a member
  • Seem mild, such as with a quiet tone or language of condescension
  • Be quite active, such as aggressively attacking what is said by the participant
  • Be disingenuous, masking attacks in a passive-aggressive style

If it gets tolerated by others, especially by the people managing the group, these methods create a hostile work environment [Dealing]. 🥀

When public harassment or bullying is tolerated, the hostile environment is not only for the person directly subject to the attacks. The harassment also serves to intimidate others who observe that it is tolerated. It teaches them that misbehaviors will not be held accountable. 😤

The IETF's Anti-Harassment Policy [Anti-Harass] covers both things with one term: the classic harassment of identified groups and the targeted behavior of bullying. So the policy's text is comprehensive, and it defines unacceptable behavior as "unwelcome hostile or intimidating behavior." It also declares: "Harassment of this sort will not be tolerated in the IETF." 🙌 If harassment happens, the way to seek a remedy is through a designated Ombudsperson. ✨

Lots of other organizations handle bullying and harassment together too, including ones with super varied membership and open, international participation, kinda like the IETF. Some examples:

  • Scouts Canada: Bullying/Harassment Policy [SC-Cybul]
  • IEEE: Code of Conduct [IEEE-Cybul]
  • Facebook: Community Standards [F-H-Cybul]
  • LinkedIn: "Be Nice" in LinkedIn Professional Community Guidelines [L-H-Cybul]
  • YouTube: Harassment and cyberbullying [Y-H-Cybul]
  • NetHui: Kaupapa and code of conduct [NetHui]
  • GeekFeminism: Conference anti-harassment: Adopting a policy [GeekFeminism]

There's even a view that harassment is just a form of bullying, since both aim to undermine someone's participation. 🧐

Sexual harassment is bullying or coercion of a sexual nature... [Wiki-SexHarass]

Real talk: the IETF has a long history of putting up with aggressive, and even hostile, behavior from participants. So this policy is a formal and welcome change 🎀 The obvious challenge is making that change actually stick, moving the IETF from a culture that tolerates (or even encourages) interpersonal misbehavior to one that gives its increasingly diverse community a safe, professional, and productive haven. 💖

Examples of this are everywhere, even now:

  • Among long-time colleagues, whatever interpersonal style works for them is fine, even if it looks super off-putting to an outsider. The problem starts when an IETF participant acts that way with, or in front of, people who never agreed to that social contract and might not even get it. For those people, the behavior can be really alienating, and it makes them less likely to participate. Still, in the IETF, participants often feel entitled to be overly familiar, aggressive, or even hostile in ways that might be fine among colleagues but are destructive with strangers. 😬
  • The moment a comment is about any attribute of a speaker, like their motives, who they work for, or how they participate, the conversation has left technical evaluation behind. In lots of cultures, those comments are intimidating or offensive. In an open, professional participation environment, they just can't be allowed. 🚫
  • As a matter of personal style or a burst of enthusiasm, it's easy to slip into condescending or dismissive commentary about someone's statements. As a discussion technique, though, its purpose is to shrink the target's influence on the group. Whether it's nonverbal (like rolling your eyes), paternalistic (like pointing out the target's naivete), or overtly hostile (like questioning the target's motives), it tries to sideline the person instead of engaging with the merits of what they're saying. That counts as harassment or bullying. 💅

3. Constructive Participation ✨

Getting open, diverse participation takes explicit, ongoing organizational effort around group access, engagement, and facilitation. 🌸

3.1. Access 🔑

Helping participants access IETF materials and discussions means it's easy for them to:

  • Know what exists
  • Find what is of interest
  • Retrieve documents or gain access to discussions
  • Be able to understand the content

Once materials and discussions are found, the main way to make the substance of the work easy to reach is for statements to be clear and explanatory. 📚 Writers and speakers need to think carefully about their likely audience and package their statements to fit. That often means taking a more tutorial approach than you'd naturally pick. When speaking, it means going a bit more slowly and clearly than you would with close collaborators. Cryptic language, linguistic idiosyncrasies, or speech that's too fast make the content dramatically less accessible to a diverse audience. 🙈

3.2. Engagement 🗣️

Once content is accessible, the next challenge is getting diverse contributions for further development. Engagement means it's easy for constructive participants to be heard and taken seriously through constructive interaction. 🫶

Inside the IETF, the most common challenge is figuring out how to respond to comments. The heart of the IETF is making proposals and commenting on them. Disagreement is common, and it's often healthy, depending on how it's pursued. ⚡

3.3. Facilitation 🧚

To get the best technology, the best ideas first need to be harvested 🍓 Processes that promote free-ranging discussion, draw out new ideas, and tackle concerns should be promoted. This also includes:

  • Encouraging contributions from timid speakers
  • Showing warmth for new contributors
  • Preventing dominance by, or blind deference to, those perceived as the more senior and authoritative contributors
  • Actively shutting down derogatory styles

It's important that participants are facilitated in putting forward their own ideas readily, so that innovation thrives. 🦋

3.4. Balance ⚖️

There's a bigger challenge too, which is finding balance between efforts to facilitate diversity and efforts to achieve work goals. Being inclusive includes a degree of tutorial assistance for new participants. It also includes some tolerance for participants who are less efficient at doing the work. And not everyone is capable of being constructive, so the burden of accommodating those folks can easily become onerous. 😮‍💨

Meeting agendas are one example of the tradeoffs. There's common pushback against working group meetings being a string of presentations. For good efficiency, participants want just enough presentation to frame a question, and then they want to spend face-to-face time in discussion. But "just enough presentation" doesn't leave much room for tutorial commentary to help people new to the effort. Meeting time is always too short, and the main requirement is to achieve forward progress. ⏰

3.5. IETF Track Record 🏆

The IETF's track record for making its technical documents openly available is notably superb, and so is its official policy of open participation in mailing lists and meetings. 🥹 Its track record with management and process documentation is more mixed. Part of the reason is that those cover overhead functions rather than the main line of IETF work, and so they don't always get diligent attention. Factors include the inherent challenges of doing management as engineers, along with challenges in making management and process documents usable for non-experts and non-native English speakers. 🌍

On the surface, the IETF's track record for open access and engagement looks astonishingly good, since there is no "membership," and anyone is permitted to join IETF mailing lists and attend IETF meetings. ✨ Honestly, for people with good funding, time for travel, and skill at figuring out the IETF culture, the record really does qualify as excellent. 👑

But very real challenges exist for people with funding, logistics, or language limitations. In particular, these impede attendance at meetings. Another challenge is for people from more polite cultures who get alienated by the style of aggressive debate that's popular in the IETF. 🥺

3.6. Avoiding Distraction

okay so, for any one participant, some other participant's contributions might feel problematic 🙃 and honestly might have little or no value. Worse, some messages are written in a style that sets off a big personal, negative reaction 😤

how you respond to those messages totally changes how productive the group is 💅 Attacking someone's style, motives, or credentials is not useful at all. It just drags the conversation away from the actual substance 🙄 So when you're facing those challenges, and there are lots of ways to have a constructive exchange, here's what helps:

  • Ignore such contributions. Maybe someone else can start a productive exchange, but there is no requirement that anyone respond 🫶
  • Respond to the content, not the author. In the extreme, literally ignore the author and just address the group about the content 🧚
  • Offer better content, including an explanation of the reasons it is better 🔥

The essential point is that the way to have a constructive exchange about substance is to focus on the substance ✨ The way to avoid getting distracted is to ignore whatever is personal and irrelevant to the substance 🦋

4. Responses to Unconstructive Participation 🛑

sometimes problematic participants just can't reasonably be ignored 😭 Their behavior is too disruptive, too offensive, or too damaging to group exchange. Any of us might have a moment of excess, but when the behavior is too extreme or represents a pattern, it warrants intervention 💀

a lot of people think this should be handled personally, but for cases like these, that rarely has much effect 🙈 This is where IETF management intervention is required. The IETF now has a reasonably rich set of policies about problematic behavior, so the requirement is merely to exercise the policies diligently 📋 Depending on the details, the working group chair, mailing list moderator, Ombudsperson, or perhaps IETF Chair is the appropriate person to contact [MlLists] [Anti-Harass] 🎀

the challenge here is for both management and the rest of the community to work together in communicating that harassment and bullying will not be tolerated 🫶 The formal policies make that declaration, but they have no meaning unless they're actually enforced ⭐

abusive behavior is easily extinguished. All it takes is community resolve. 🌸

5. Security Considerations 🚨

bestie, this section is seriously important 😤 The security of the IETF's role in the Internet community depends on its credibility as an open and productive venue for collaborative development of technical documents. More diverse scrutiny leads to increased rigor, so the quality of technical documents can potentially improve 📈 There's also the potential for future legal liability in the various jurisdictions where the IETF operates, which means there's a need to act to reinforce behavioral policies, with specific attention to workplace safety 🛡️ this is not optional, periodt. 💅

6. References 📚

6.1. Normative References

[Anti-Harass]
           IESG, "IETF Anti-Harassment Policy", November 2013,
           <https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/
           ietf-anti-harassment-policy.html>.

[MlLists]  IESG, "IESG Guidance on the Moderation of IETF Working
           Group Mailing Lists", August 2000,
           <https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/
           moderated-lists.html>.

6.2. Informative References

[Bully-Ser]
           Tim Field Foundation, "Introduction to the Serial Bully:
           Serial Bully Traits", <http://bullyonline.org/workbully/
           serial_introduction.htm>.

[Dealing]  Government of South Australia, "Dealing with Workplace
           Bullying: A practical guide for employees", Interagency
           Round Table on Workplace Bullying, South Australia, 2007,
           <https://crana.org.au/uploads/pdfs/
           SAgov_bullying_employees.pdf>.

[Defensive]
           Bickham, I., "Defensive Communication",
           <http://www.people-communicating.com/
           defensive-communication.html>.

[Div-Discuss]
           IETF, "Diversity Discussion List", <http://www.ietf.org/
           mail-archive/web/diversity/current/maillist.html>.

[Div-DT]   IETF, "Diversity Design Team wiki", 2013,
           <https://wiki.tools.ietf.org/group/diversity-dt/>.

[Escalated]
           Namie, G., "Workplace bullying: Escalated incivility",
           Ivey Business Journal 9B03TF09, November/December 2003.

[F-H-Cybul]
           Facebook, "Community Standards", 2015,
           <https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards>.

[GeekFeminism]
           Geek Feminism Wiki, "Conference anti-harassment: Adopting
           a policy", <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/
           Conference_anti-harassment>.

[Har-Bul]  UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development,
           "Harassment and bullying at work", January 2015,
           <http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/factsheets/
           harassment-bullying-at-work.aspx>.

[Horowitz] Horwitz, S. and I. Horwitz, "The Effects of Team Diversity
           on Team Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of Team
           Demography", Journal of Management, Vol. 33 (6),
           p. 987-1015, DOI 10.1177/0149206307308587, December 2007.

[IAB]      "Internet Architecture Board", <https://www.iab.org/>.

[IAOC]     "IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC)",
           <https://iaoc.ietf.org/>.

[IEEE-Cybul]
           IEEE, "IEEE CODE OF CONDUCT", June 2014,
           <https://www.ieee.org/about/ieee_code_of_conduct.pdf>.

[IETF]     IETF, "The Internet Engineering Task Force",
           <https://www.ietf.org/>.

[Joshi]    Joshi, A. and H. Roh, "The Role of Context in Work Team
           Diversity Research: A Meta-Analytic Review", Academy of
           Management Journal, Vol. 52, No. 3, 599-627,
           DOI 10.5465/AMJ.2009.41331491, 2009,
           <http://www.ilo.bwl.uni-muenchen.de/download/
           unterlagen-ws1415/josh-roh-2009.pdf>.

[Kellogg]  Kellogg Insight, "Better Decisions Through Diversity:
           Heterogeneity can boost group performance", Kellogg School
           of Management, Northwestern University, Oct 2010,
           <http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/
           better_decisions_through_diversity>.

[L-H-Cybul]
           LinkedIn, "LinkedIn Professional Community Guidelines",
           2015,
           <https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/34593>.

[MB-Misuse]
           Rachel Burger, R., "Three Common Ways Libertarians Misuse
           Myers-Briggs Part 2: Misunderstanding the Feeling
           Preference", July 2013, <http://thoughtsonliberty.com/
           three-common-ways-libertarians-misuse-myers-briggs-part-2-
           misunderstanding-the-feeling-preference>.

[NetHui]   InternetNZ, "Kaupapa and code of conduct", NetHui 2015,
           <http://2015.nethui.nz/code-of-conduct>.

[Prevention]
           WorkSafe Victoria, "Workplace bullying - prevention and
           response", October 2012,
           <http://www.worksafe.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/
           pdf_file/0008/42893/WS_Bullying_Guide_Web2.pdf>.

[SC-Cybul] Scouts Canada, "Bullying/Harassment Policy", May 2012,
           <http://www.scouts.ca/cys/
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[Signs]    Workplace Bullying Institute, "Employee Resource Council:
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[Stahl]    Stahl, G., Maznevski, M., Voigt, A., and K. Jonsen,
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[Wiki-SexHarass]
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[wikiHow]  WikiHow, "How to Deal with Workplace Bullying and
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[WiseCrowd]
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[Workplace]
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[Y-H-Cybul]
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Acknowledgements 🫶

this document was inspired by the organizational change signaled when the IESG adopted an anti-harassment policy for the IETF, plus a bunch of follow-on activities and discussions that happened after 🌈 A few individuals offered thoughtful comments during private discussions 💜

Comments on the original draft were provided by John Border and SM (Subramanian Moonesamy) 👑

Authors' Addresses 🎀

Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
675 Spruce Drive
Sunnyvale, CA  94086
United States

Phone: +1.408.246.8253
Email: dcrocker@bbiw.net


Narelle Clark
Pavonis Consulting
C/- PO Box 1705
North Sydney, NSW  2059
Australia

Phone: +61 412297043
Email: narelle.clark@pavonis.com.au
📦 where this page comes from