Bron,
I agree with John, I think it is bac practice to discuss names and
selections.
/Loa
On 23/01/2021 13:09, Bron Gondwana wrote:
On Sat, Jan 23, 2021, at 15:43, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Saturday, January 23, 2021 13:29 +1100 Bron Gondwana
<brong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:brong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> Hi Rich,
>
> You make some very interesting points here. I'm interested in
> whether you think the issue is with the pool of available
> candidates who put their hands up for roles, or with the
> selection process not valuing diversity sufficiently.
>
> And of course there is a related question here - regardless of
> which you think the root cause - because we are an
> organisation composed of those who show up. That question is:
>
> of the available candidates, if you had the choice, who would
> you have selected instead of those who were chosen? i.e. what
> would your "perfect" slate have been, given the candidates
> that were available.
Bron,
Since Rich was one of the candidates, asking him that question
may be a bit unfair. More generally, I think the community
might be better off if we avoided second-guessing the Nomcom
decisions in terms of specific people and stuck instead with the
concerns that Rich described and Jason's response.
Hi John,
I would say quite the opposite. If he'd been selected and had to work
with everyone else, then this would be an unfair question, but otherwise
I think it's a vital question and deserves to be addressed.
We see many claims that it would be better to increase the diversity of
representation among the leadership of people along certain of the axes
along which humans differ, and Rich has specifically taken the time to
decry a lack of said diversity in the current leadership (both
concluding and incoming).
I'm actually particularly interested to see whether Rich suggests that
he would have been the best choice for the role that he applied for,
despite being white, male, cis-gendered and western. Given those facts,
I'm interested in how he squares the request for increased diversity
with his candidacy, given that the diversity would by definition have to
be created by picking non-{western white male}s for other roles in the
leadership.
You can't divorce the abstract concerns from the concrete underlying
constraints. It's nice to have those concerns in the abstract, but
"rough consensus and running code" - you can't have a rough consensus
that "we get more type-X person into leadership" without running "we
encourage type-X people to run and we choose them when they do".
I observe a lot of "we should have more of people not like me in
leadership, and yet I want to keep my place in leadership" in the world,
and it's incongruent. I don't think Rich's statement of a general goal
can stand independent of there existing realistic pathways to achieve
that goal, and hence I think it's fair to ask Rich what realistic
pathway exists to have delivered a result that he would have been more
satisfied with than this one.
Regards,
Bron.
--
Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
brong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
--
Loa Andersson email: loa@xxxxx
Senior MPLS Expert loa.pi.nu@xxxxxxxxx
Bronze Dragon Consulting phone: +46 739 81 21 64
