MAJOR ISSUE: "Concentration of power"

[Margaret Wasserman]

At 05:57 PM 6/19/2003 -0700, hardie at qualcomm.com wrote:
>         I think the heart of the matter, though, is that
>some significant population that wants to participate
>in the IETF feels excluded.  Further, the basis of that
>exclusion is such that the participant has no immediate
>way of determining either the cause of the exclusion
>or the method for achieving inclusion.   Whatever terms
>we use, this needs to be captured as an issue.

This resonates with me.

I felt this way during my early IETF involvement.  I
could see places where I could contribute, and I believed
that I had the ability and commitment to make a real
contribution to the IETF (opinions may still differ on
that ;-)), but I didn't understand how to sign-up...

At the current moment, I believe that the IETF has a
small, ridiculously overworked, core group of contributors,
and a much larger, underutilized group of potential
contributors.  How do we fix that?

Margaret