John,
I would add one, which is the consequence of your "known enough
to the AD..." observation. There is a completely natural
tendency, whether it causes this problem or others, for the ADs
to keep going back to the same well of people who have known
abilities, especially abilities to handle this sort of
situation. To the extent to which that happens, it suggests
three meta-issues:
(i) We aren't doing enough to develop leadership and spread the responsibilities around. In many cases, if all of those criteria cannot be met, it would be far better to drop the "known enough to the AD" and/or "knows enough about the IETF process" criteria requirements and focus on the others plus an apparent willingness to learn, then add in someone who meets those requirements but whose role is advise and mentor the Chair(s) --and do so with some authority and a close relationship with the AD-- than to focus on those criteria.
(ii) We need to encourage more interactions between sitting ADs and those who are not already WG Chairs, IESG members, or IAB members. The current patterns of ADs tending to spend all of an IETF week together, with WG Chairs, and monitoring WGs are not conducive to ADs getting to know people who are not already part of the leadership structure well enough to meet that criterion.
(iii) Without getting into whether the problem of overlong AD tenures has been fixed or whether the shorter terms today are just a temporary aberration, very long tenures on the IESG, rather than having people regularly return to the trenches and get first-hand experience, also, IMO, tends to aggravate the problem of the AD not knowing a wide enough range of possible WG Chair candidates
All excellent points. I would add that the process should start from the potential new chair "resource" at least being (a) known to IETF management so that he can even be considered and (b) the resource getting experience in IETF work.
I recall Brian's list of desirable chair characteristics. I recall that we have had threads about how successful our review attempts have been. We all called for cross-area review and high expertise*. I know that when I appoint editors or secretaries as a chair I go for the best persons I can find -- even if they are already doing a lot**.
Looks like we are always going to the same pool. No wonder our re-org and review team attempts sometimes fail. Those people are already doing all they can. Creating new forums for them will not increase the amount of time in a day.
We need to start recruiting new people. There's been excellent work recently in the training side -- but we also need to pick those people as editors, secretaries, co-chairs of a more experienced chair, pick random WG members as reviewers etc. Of course we are already doing it, but we need to do more of it. Otherwise the pool does not increase.
--Jari
*) One review team attempt failed after only one review had been performed, by a know IETF person who is already 120% occupied with reviews anyway. What did the team accomplish?
**) The most active IETF persons can have as many as ~50 drafts.
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