Hi Andrew,

I understand your point. However although we think we know what diversity means, in reality the meaning of diversity is far more complex - especially in the context of this group. I'm challenging the notion that diversity means race/gender/and sexual orientation. And there's religion which is the other invidious class - odd no one mentioned religion. btw - my deity can kick you deity's ass.

I think my definitions of diversity are more relevant than the traditional one in this context.

On 1/31/2013 10:50 PM, Andrew A. Adams wrote:

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.