Hi, Michael,
On 25/1/21 16:06, Michael StJohns wrote:
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.
Wouldn't "drag in the appropriate people from some of the larger
companies" actually be the wrong first step?
Those larger companies usually have the means for financial support,
operating in a specific set of countries, and have a specific level of
influence in the IETF. (many of these things are probably quite related
with the diversity problem).
In that light, why not poll:
* folks from such large companies
* folks from universities
* independent consultants.
And for all of the above items, have folks from each of the different
regions and, to the extent that's possible, from multiple genders.
(Still not perfect, but certainly a more diverse sample to tackle the
problem of diversity -- otherwise it might result in micro-diversity)
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.
Wouldn't the Internet Society be an obvious fit for this one?
Thanks!
Regards,
--
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: fgont@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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