Mike: >>>>> Actually, I don't think this is even a mostly correct statement - >>>>> that AD select chairs. Dave: >>>> It is a long-standing, simple, objective, unvarying management fact of >>>> IETF procedure: ADs hire and fire wg chairs. Mike: >>> The AD's do have the final say. No question. But "select" implies >>> that the own the entire process of creating and staffing a WG. Nope. Dave: >> They do "own" it; that's a formal truth. >> >> That they often delegate details and concur with self-organizing choices >> means nothing, in terms of their authority. Dan: > But it might mean something in terms of the discussion at hand. If the > ADs are concurring with self-organizing choices as opposed to selecting > WG chairs, then they aren't really imposing a "looks like me" bias into > the selection process. OK, here: I have to step in now. Let me look at the new working group chairs and BoF chairs in the App Area (as that's my area) since I've been an AD (one year, so far). Chair changes: APPSAWG: added Murray Kucherawy and Salvatore Loreto CORE: added Andrew McGregor IRI: added Peter Saint-Andre New working groups WEIRDS: Olaf Kolkman and Murray Kucherawy SCIM: Morteza Ansari and Leif Johansson SPFBIS: SM and Andrew Sullivan IMAPMOVE: Ned Freed and Alexey Melnikov JCARDCAL: Bert Greevenbosch and Peter Saint-Andre QRESYNC: Dave Cridland and Eliot Lear BoFs at IETF 83: SCIM: Eliot Lear and Steve Bellovin WEIRDS: Andrew Sullivan BoFs at IETF 84: DSII: Beth Pale and Ted Hardie BoFs at IETF 86: AGGSRV: Peter Saint-Andre JSON: Joe Hildebrand In all but one of these cases, we (the ADs) contacted people and *asked* them to chair. The exception was DSII and Beth Pale, but this was not a working-group-forming BoF (and Ted was the one we solicited). For the SCIM working group, Morteza was one of the proponents of the IETF 83 BoF, but he did not ask to be chair, and *I asked him* only after consulting with folks and getting opinions that suggested that he would be a good choice. That has generally been my approach and Pete's to finding chairs: getting opinions other than our own. We have a couple of other new chartering efforts in process, and we'll be handling those similarly: selecting people we think will be appropriate to chair those working groups. Of course, if someone comes to us and says that they'd like to chair a working group, we will take that into consideration. But we most certainly do NOT simply appoint people because they're technology proponents, nor because they ask us to. My sense of the rest of the IESG is that they behave similarly. I can tell you unequivocally that the ADs appoint the chairs, and "own the entire process of [...] staffing a WG". We are not just taking the people who come to us and saying, "Yeah, sure, you'll do." We also want to find new chairs -- in the working-group chairs list above, Andrew, Morteza, SM, Bert, and Dave are all first-time chairs. Pete and I are also actively looking to increase the diversity in App Area chairs -- perhaps you'll notice that we have *no* female chairs in the App Area, at least partly because we have no women who are active in the App Area just now. We're working on that (and on other diversity aspects) -- see, for example, the first item here: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/85/slides/slides-85-apparea-0.pdf We're always eager for suggestions for people to be on our list of potential chairs; please send such to <app-ads@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>. And, yes, we *do* own the staffing process. Barry, Applications AD