On 1/24/2021 6:28 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote:
Can I just top-post to throw into the mix that one of the candidate questionnaire questions is (quite reasonably) to you have support from your employer (financial and time) to fill this role. Answering this question, of course, means going to your employer and getting that support (or for independents finding a sponsor). This represents a certain investment in of reputation, may be a lot of work, and can be treated differently by employers when a candidate is not selected.
One of the main drivers of our "diversity" problem is the input set of people from which we draw our candidates - it lacks diversity on a number of axes. We've noted this before - that GIGO or rather Conformity In is Conformity Out.
I wanted to pull out this paragraph from Adrian's note and use it to make a suggestion: Let's have the last 5 or so Nomcom chairs plus Andrew drag in the appropriate people from some of the larger companies and ask them to help us with our candidate diversity problem. E.g. a substantial portion of the folk that end up as ADs or IAB or other leadership are funded as part of their employment with those companies. It might actually be a useful exercise to look at the input representations we're getting from those companies and see if perhaps they can work internally to help broaden the diversity of the set of people they send to the IETF.
It may also make sense to see if they'd be interested in providing funding for candidates not from those larger companies (e.g. smaller sole consultancies, academia, non-profit research institutes) that may not be able to find internal support for the large time commitments the ADs especially have to make. In academic terms - an endowed chair. I'm not looking for them to fund their competitors obviously, but there may be some benefit in providing support for someone nominally independent of their company.
Later, Mike
