--On Tuesday, July 14, 2020 22:54 +0000 Andrew Campling <andrew.campling@419.consulting> wrote: > On 14-Jul-20 21:57, Brian E Carpenter > <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> I'd also like to challenge the assumption that the result is >> necessarily bad. >> >> If the IETF was a more typical SDO, we'd be funded by >> membership subscriptions and we might well have voting >> weighted by membership categories. So big companies would >> have proportionate power. For good reasons, we don't do >> that. Nevertheless, the fact is that big companies can (and >> do) send more people, and provide more sponsorship (such as >> hosting meetings, and funding Area Directors), than small >> companies. If they didn't get something back for that, they >> would complain, or simply withdraw their resources. The >> chance to have two people in the NomCom is quite a small >> "something" IMHO. > > I think that this is a very valid point. I do wonder though > whether there may be an opportunity to inject a little more > diversity into the process by requiring the second NomCom > member from any organisation to be based in a different > continent than the first? This shouldn't be too onerous for > big companies as their operations will typically have > multinational if not global scope. It would be even better to > have limits on the total number of NomCom members from a given > country and/or continent but at least seeking some diversity > from within companies would be a good start. I'm not sure that is the right problem to solve. First, some big companies who have multinational operations may not have technical Internet operations in as many countries as they have operations of any type, so the effect of such a rule might easily be to limit them to a single Nomcom member where the randomization process would have given them too. Those same companies often move people around for either short or long appointments in different facilities. That can lead to the sort of hairsplitting that I think we are best off avoiding rather than trying to make rules to cover every case (or require us to give the Chair sufficient discretion to make at least some of us anxious). For example, assume the first person selected from a given company is in country A. The second person is a citizen of country B but is on a long-time assignment, perhaps nominally a permanent one, in country A. Eligible or not? If that is a short-term appointment for, say, less than a year, but they normally work in country B, does that change the eligibility? Conversely, suppose the second person is a citizen of country A working in country B? Are they eligible? Or suppose they normally work in country A but transfer to country B. How long before or after the first Nomcom list is drawn from the pool is it ok for them make that move and be eligible because there is already someone on the Nomcom list from that company and country A? I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but I'm fairly sure that trying to lay out all of the cases (the above is certainly not a complete list) and make rules for each would be crazy-making and that we would still encounter an edge case. So I don't think we should go there regardless of the advantages of perceived demographic diversity unless we are really, really sure that those advantages would be worth the pain. Let me suggest something different, and a different kind of diversity, that has come up before in other forms. Assume that we can agree that the current 6 of 10 situation is a problem. I think it could then actually be three rather different problems: (1) Absent the kinds of geographical you suggest, it may reduce geographical diversity. (2) I recognize what Brian is saying and may have more to say about it when I get my thoughts together, but the very fact that a disproportionate fraction of the Nomcom puts us at risk of a Nomcom with certain types of biases that typically go with such companies. For example, suppose there are two candidates for a given slot on the IESG. Both are qualified from the standpoint of prior IETF participation and leadership at the WG level and both are technical leaders in the relevant area. One of them believes quite passionately that the IETF has gotten too complex and too expensive in which to participate and that it should be an objective to reduce complexity, costs, time commitments needed to participate in the leadership, and so on. The other has spent most of her or his career in large companies with generous travel support and generous support for the IETF and similar bodies. All thing being equal, one would expect a Nomcom most of whose members come out of those large (and generous) company environments to be less sympathetic to the problems the first person identifies with and hence less sympathetic to that person than would be the case for a Nomcom with more diversity of organization types, occupational categories, etc. (3) Typically, these bigger companies tend to have much of their technical interests --at least as represented by the people they support to participate in the IETF-- in a relatively small number of IETF areas. To the extent that is true and their two Nomcom members (or five or six of the group from that collection of companies), that face may reduce the diversity of the Nomcom with regard to Areas (both in the IETF sense and areas of work more generally), reducing the range of perspectives about what is important, where the Nomcom should spend its time getting things just right, and what expertise is available in the Nomcom for candidate evaluation. It is not impossible to address the third and still stick to objective criteria. One could ask volunteers for the Nomcom to identify, not just an employer but the not more than two IETF Areas in which they most strongly identify and/or have done most of their work. One could then think about a rule much like the one you suggested about geography: if a given company already had one volunteer seated who was associated with a given Area, any other candidates from that company who came to the top of the queue would be disqualified unless they identified with a different area. If that information were made public --it certainly should not be a secret -- it would be hard to game (and much less complex than sorting out geography) because its not passing a laugh test would be grounds for a challenge. I don't know whether having that sort of criterion would be a good idea, but I believe that examining it would be, at least, a useful thought experiment and that more diversity in the Nomcom along those lines would be useful in practice. best, john
