--On Friday, July 24, 2020 08:36 -0700 Bob Hinden
<bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Melinda,
>
>> On Jul 23, 2020, at 11:37 PM, Melinda Shore
>> <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> On 7/23/20 6:14 PM, Martin Thomson wrote:
>>> That said, if the NomCom were to decide that the procedure
>>> for choosing IETF chair was to blindfold each person and
>>> have them pin something to pictures of nominees, akin to the
>>> children's party game of pin the tail on the donkey, I can
>>> see why liaisons might want to have a say in that. That
>>> might be better dealt with by including that in a report to
>>> a confirming body.
>>
>> Indeed.
>>
>> I was IAB liaison a few years ago and stayed out (or tried to
>> stay out) of the decision-making process. It seems to me to
>> be important to avoid creating processes that are effectively
>> closed and/or uniform, and nomcom is one of the most obvious
>> places in the IETF where that can happen. I think it's
>> valuable to give them space to breathe and to deal with any
>> gross irregularities during the confirmation process.
>>
>
> I agree.
>
> I think about this as liaisons are there to answer questions
> about the group they are from (and report back on the process
> to their groups), but otherwise should not be speaking.
> Otherwise, they are having an undue influence on the NomCom
> process.
This subthread opens up a relate issued that I've been avoiding
commenting on. The original assumptions about the Nomcom was
that the number of voting members would be large in comparison
to the number of liaisons, advisors, and miscellaneous
hangers-on and that all voting Nomcom members would have a
relatively high degree of knowledge of the IETF, IAB, and their
functions and operations going in. The analysis that Barbara
posted indicates that the number of liaisons and advisors is now
over half the size of the voting membership. Comments that she
and others have made imply that contemporary Nomcoms are heavily
reliant on the liaisons (and any advisors who are allowed to
speak up) for information about the functioning of the relevant
bodies, what is needed in terms of people to fill positions,
etc. That almost inevitably creates a bias toward the status
quo in those bodies: if one of them includes people who think
that the body is badly off-course and that some incumbents need
to go, the odds that such people will be selected as liaisons
are low. As long as everything is going well everywhere, that
is fine.
However, if there are perceptions in the community that things
are not going well -- because an incumbent has become
problematic despite possibly having a large and loud fan club,
because an area (or the entire IAB) is structured badly relative
to community needs but incumbents have been resistant to change,
or because the relevant body has gone astray (our best example
predates the Nomcom but would be the IAB during the "Kobe"
period whose behavior led to the current general structure of
the IETF)-- then there is considerable risk that the liaisons
will act as forces to resist change.
Especially if it is time to rethink liaison or advisor roles,
what is visible to them and how much they are visible to the
Nomcom, and who determines procedures, it may be worth thinking
about those risks and what might be done to mitigate them.
john
