John,
I fully agree. To me the only sequence of events that makes sense is
1. Agree on the job description. (But it needs to drafted by a small group first.)
2. Ask ISOC to fund a position for 1 year, and hire someone. (But the IETF leadership has to be intimately involved in the hiring process.)
3. Have the new person develop a budget model and the RFP. (But the IETF community gets to review the draft RFP.)
4. Worry about whether to create a separate legal entity later.
Brian
John C Klensin wrote:
Brian,
Based on the experiences of the last month or so, I'm not
enthused --to put it mildly-- to put "write a job description"
into the hands of a committee appointed by unknown methods, with
an unknown set of instructions, and supervised by groups who
have no obvious charter (or experience) for this type of work.
You may well be right that "the person" is important, but I
think the current environment is going to make it hard to hire
the right person, or to have confidence that we have done so,
especially with all of the surrounding uncertainty about
structure and mission.
The notion that we are going to hire this person in parallel with writing and getting proposals on RFPs that he or she will have to manage also makes no organization sense to me. Before, so that the person can participate in the RFP effort (which I think was the original plan) makes sense. After, so the person taking the job understands what he or she has to work with... maybe not ideal, but workable. But "in parallel" is the sort of thing that, IMO, would cause anyone competent, experienced, and who understands the issues to be extremely reluctant to consider the job. And I can't believe that we want to bias the selection process against the competent, experience, and comprehending.
So, if "be specific about what this job is about" is going to be delegated from "community review and approval of a proposal that is presumably based on Carl's report" to "a team that writes a job description", then I think the community needs to review and approve that job description before any hiring effort starts.
Otherwise, we seem to be sliding backwards into these decisions. And that just is not, IMO, the way to work through a "you bet the entire future of the IETF" process.
john
--On Monday, 13 September, 2004 16:55 +0200 Brian E Carpenter <brc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We have to bootstrap somehow. Asking ISOC to hire someone, on a fixed term contract of employment, would work for me. Of course, the team that searches for and interviews the candidates has to start by writing a job description.
Brian
John C Klensin wrote:
--On Friday, 10 September, 2004 08:49 -0400 scott bradner <sob@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
imo we should start a search for a Administrative Director now
Good idea, except...
* We have only the vaguest of job descriptions
* We don't know who the individual would actually be
working for organizationally, which could make a
difference in who would be interested
* We don't know enough about organizational structure to
be able to have a serious discussion about benefits,
etc., which could make a difference. We don't even
know, for sure, if we have budget for salary, since that
presumably would need to be approved by the Board of
ISOC and/or the hypothetical foundation.
* We can't make any assurances about how long the job
commitment is good for, because we don't have a
structure to put around it.
And, with regard to the "contractor" question, there are two ways of doing "contractor":
(1) The individual is hired as an independent
contractor, and hence is responsible for his or her own
insurance, benefits, taxes, etc., but is otherwise
essentially an employee. In particular, we select the
individual who is going to be in the role. The problem
with those models is that sometimes the taxing
authorities don't like them and pronounce words that, in
US-speak are "statutory employee". Those are _very_ bad
words; for an explanation contact your friendly attorney
or accountant.
(2) We hire a company to supply us someone. Problem is
that, at the bottom line, they pick the someone.
Neither of these are consistent with the level of control which the IETF leadership (or their spokespeople) think they need. Of course, that is another unresolved issue.
Sorry.
john
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