[NCSG-Discuss] On Diversity and Discrimination

[Andrew A. Adams]

Marc,

You seem to have missed the context of the discussion of diversity. It arose 
because of discussions of the GNSO endorsements of candidates for the ATRT2 
team. While Avri, Dan, myself and others have engaged in a general discussion 
of diversity, the issue I was posting on and that the others taking this 
question seriously seemed to me to be posting on, is the question of required 
diversity in bodies with specific authority or whose outputs are likely to be 
used to strongly and formally influence piolicy-making. Voluntary membership 
organisations such as NCUC/NCSG may also form an echo-chamber and self-aware 
people interested in equality, justice and fairness may seek to put some 
resources into outreach to disproportionately encourage new members from 
under-represented groups.

Your discussion about intelligence levels, US political leanings and US 
sports teams are rather off-the-point and in fact represent a classic 
misdirection argument about any form of attempting to improve diversity of 
representation.

If you haven't already seen it, I heartily recommend John Scalzi's post on 
"Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is":

http://tinyurl.com/cngqk4h

On this list we have good gender balance, some reasonable representation from 
developing countries and some other geographic diversity (though I think the 
only Japan-based members of the list are immigrant SWMs from the UK or US, 
but I might be mis-remembering, and I don't recall seeing any Korean-based 
posters - FYI Korea and Japan have some of the highest Internet penetration 
rates in the world, but are very unengaged in Internet governance fora). But 
we're just one constituency in ICANN and many of the others seem far less 
diverse and even with our diversity, it would be easy for the formal bodies 
of ICANN to end up unrepresentative, and therefore producing poorer policies.

Forgive me for being concerned about such issues, but as an information 
ethicist, looking at the mechanisms creating and perpetuating inequality in 
information services is one of my research interests.



-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/