The NomCom has been asked to fill the Transport Area Director position now vacant as a result of Jon Peterson's nomination to Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area Director and resignation from his position as Transport Area Director. Therefore, the NomCom is now accepting nominations for Transport Area Director, to fill the remaining one year of the term of the vacant Transport AD position. Nominations will close at 1700EST on Friday, March 3. The requirements for the Transport Area Director position are included below. Please send nominations, including the nominee's name, e-mail address and telephone number (if available) to nomcom05@xxxxxxxxx - Ralph Droms Chair, NomCom 2005-2006 ----- Transport Area: The technical areas covered by the Transport area are those with data transport goals or with transport design issues and impact on congestion in Internet. To illustrate the latter: the Pseudowire Emulation Edge to Edge working group (PWE3) was initially in Transport until the architecture was developed, and then moved to the Internet area. The major topics in Transport are protocols (TCP, UDP, SCTP, DCCP), congestion control, multicast transports, QOS and reservation signaling, performance metrics, NAT regularization, NFS, and Internet storage. Transport is considering future work in generalized forward error correction, overlay multicast, very high bandwidth traffic, and peer to peer protocol transport. A Transport AD should have a good understanding of congestion control, flow control, real-time transport protocols and other transport-level issues that affect application layer protocols. These basic transport skills should also be augmented by strong interest and skills in such issues as NAT and identity. The Transport area intersects most frequently with Internet Area, the Applications Area, the RAI Area, and the Security Area. So, cross-area expertise in any of those areas would be particularly useful. The Transport area has a strong management tradition. Although the technical areas are many, a Transport Area Director should have not just technical skills but also strong management and communication skills. Two of the critical skills that the Area values especially: o Guiding working groups to follow their charters closely o Nurturing new talent for the area's leadership Generic Requirements: IESG members are the managers of the IETF standards process. This means that they must understand the way the IETF works, be good at working with other people, be able to inspire and encourage other people to work together on a volunteer basis, and have sound technical judgment about IETF technology and its relationship to technology developed elsewhere. ADs select and directly manage the WG chairs, so IESG members should possess sufficient interpersonal and management skills to manage ~15-30 part-time people. Most ADs are also responsible for one or more directorates or review teams. So the ability to identify good leaders and technical experts and recruit them for IETF work is required. Having been a WG chair helps in understanding the WG chair role, and will help in resolving problems and issues that a WG chair may have. In addition, all IESG members should have strong technical expertise that crosses two or three IETF areas. Ideally, an IESG member would have made significant technical contributions in more than one IETF area, preferably authoring documents and/or chairing WGs in more than one area. IESG members are expected to make sure that every document coming before the IESG is properly reviewed. Although IESG members may delegate the actual review to individuals or review teams, the IESG members will need to understand and represent the reviewers' objections or comments. So the ability and willingness to read and understand complex information quickly is another important attribute in an IESG member. (Note that this does not mean that every AD must review every draft personally - but they must be satisfied that adequate review has taken place.) It is helpful for an IESG member to have a good working knowledge of the IETF document process and WG creation and chartering process. This knowledge is most likely to be found in experienced IETF WG chairs, but may also be found in authors of multiple documents. IESG members must also have strong verbal and written communications skills and a proven track record of leading and contributing to the consensus of diverse groups. A few comments on the IESG role: Serving on the IESG requires a substantial time commitment. The basic IESG activities consume between 25 and 40 hours per week (varying by area and by month, with the most time required immediately before IETF meetings). Most IESG members also participate in additional IETF leadership activities, further increasing the time commitment for those individuals. Even if they do not occupy formal liaison positions, ADs may also need to interact with external bodies such as other standards organizations, which may require travel. It is also imperative that IESG members attend all IETF meetings and up to two additional IESG retreats per year. Because of the large time and travel commitments, employer support for a full two year stint is essential for an IESG member. Because of personal impact including awkwardly timed conference calls, an IESG member's family must also be supportive. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf