Dear colleagues,

My main concern with the diversity criteria as they are now is their (lack of) relevance to the work we are doing. Frankly, if diversity means discrimination against or in favour of candidates based on gender or origin, this does not smell good to me. We spent the half of the last century fighting for equal rights for all and this was reflected in many texts on human rights, be it the European convention or the Universal declaration. I don't find useful to reproduce our ancestors mistakes.

Rather, since our work is related to IP address and DNS resource allocation, maybe we should use criteria based on the number of allocated IPv4 addresses, or the number of gTLD and ccTLD domains per capita. I guess these statistics would make the landscape look quite different, but at the same time maybe more representative of the Internet context in each country.
Further, and this is a fundamental question: do the elected people need to reflect the view of the majority within the group, or do we have to have to have a system with protected minorities ?

Some statistics your may find useful:

gTLDs per country: http://www.webhosting.info/registries/country_stats/
ccTLD stats: http://www.ripe.net/info/stats/hostcount/hostcount++/earlystats/hc_vs_hcpp_04.html
Raw RIPE IP address delegation data: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/stats/delegated-ripencc-latest

I am willing to spend some time trying to extract useful data from the above, if anyone finds it useful. If not, I'd rather find other ways to spend my time.

Patrick

Stefan Hügel wrote:

I fully agree that we should go for diversity - more, I'd like to stress it. In my opinion, the candidature of Veronica Cretu does not contradict diversity, but enhances it, as she represents groups not represented by the other candidate for ALAC. The more formal aspect of ALS-membership seems a less important point to me in this case.