--On Tuesday, June 25, 2013 07:25 +0000 "Eggert, Lars" <lars@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Jun 25, 2013, at 7:53, Randy Bush <randy@xxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Congratulations, gentlemen. >> >> and they are all male > > Well, all the volunteers were male, so no real surprise here. > > (And yes, I wish the volunteer pool had been more diverse. But > it wasn't.) I haven't looked at the volunteer pool, but all of the new appointees are also North American or European. Lars, As an outgoing member of the RSOC, it would be inappropriate for me to comment here on the new membership, but I think your comment summarizes a critical issue in the ongoing diversity discussion. Personally, I think there are lessons to be learned for the future... and I wonder how many more times the community needs to discuss them before they are considered normal practice. In particular... Arturo and Peter, There is at least an outline of a job description. It appears in Section 3.1.1 of RFC 6635 and includes: "The IAB will designate the membership of the RSOC with the following goals: preserving effective stability; keeping it small enough to be effective, and keeping it large enough to provide general Internet community expertise, specific IETF expertise, publication expertise, and stream expertise. Members [...] are expected to bring a balance between short- and long-term perspectives." One can sensibly argue that the above description, possibly accompanied by comments from the IAB and/or current RSOC members, should have been in the announcement but not that it was somehow missing or secret. My personal view is that more explicitness about the description would have made little or no difference in the applicant pool as long as the announcement itself was made exclusively within IETF community mailing lists. More broadly, anyone in the community with real interest in the topics that the RSOC addresses would presumably have followed at least some of the contents of RFC 6635, 4844, and related documents; the rfc-interest list; a few recent BOFs or their minutes; RFC Editor reports in plenaries; etc. While I have no idea what the IAB did, if I were still on the IAB I certainly would have tried to determine what an applicant already knew about the work of the RSOC and the RFC Series and dropped anyone from within the community who wasn't moderately well-informed from consideration. It would be easy to deduce From those sources that the RFC Series (and hence the RSOC) face major policy and strategic challenges with authors whose technical English writing skills are not up to a professional standard for quality, with internationalization of the documents, with preserving the properties of the RFC Series as an archival collection, with document production and the relationship between generic and format markup, with increased credibility of the Series for academic publication and reference, and so on. Presumably the RSOC, as a group, should have sufficient expertise to be able to oversee investigations and decisions in those areas although RFC 6635 leaves it up to the IAB to determine how important that expertise is relative to other considerations. However, the more general issue is that the description above calls for a wide range of expertise, not all of which need to come from the same person or subset of people. While recruiting candidate IESG members from outside the IETF community would be, IMO, pretty silly, that constraint doesn't apply to the RSOC (give the description above and actual experience). It would have been, at least IMO, reasonable for the IAB to try to recruit potential RSOC members from broader communities, communities in which some of that expertise would be more broadly available than it is among "normal" IETF participants or the subset of us that carefully track IETF-announce or are active on this list. As people have commented in other contexts, if one cares, in practice, about diversity then part of the solution to issues of underrepresentation is broadening the applicant pool to include additional populations. Now, the IAB, in its wisdom, chose to not engage in such a broader recruiting effort. I have no idea whether they considered and discussed that option. If the community thinks that diversity is really important enough, then the various appointing bodies (including the Nomcom) should to told to consider --and maybe even report back on-- whether particular positions justify a broader search because posting announcements to IETF lists may not inform the best range of potential candidates. If the community believes that diversity is important and that members of appointing bodies aren't taking it seriously enough, that should be made clear to the Nomcom (remembering that the Nomcom has the right to recruit rather than waiting passively for nominations and the right --and maybe the obligation-- to inquire, when considering incumbents, about why particular decisions were made and what positions individuals took on them). In the case of bodies like the RSOC, if the community believes that the body is important (I do, but I'm biased) and that effectiveness is likely to be significantly diminished by lack of diversity in gender, expertise, and/or geography (I'm not completely convinced, but YMMD), remember that 6635 gives the IAB the power to increase the RSOC's size (or otherwise change its composition) at any time, balancing "small enough to be effective" against other perceived needs. I presume the IAB would listen to community input on that sort of subject. If they would not, the problems run much deeper than appointments to the RSOC. Or we can keep whining each time appointments are made that don't include a sufficient number of women, residents above the Arctic Circle or below the Antarctic one, or other groups that are perceived as underrepresented. The problem with whining (or wishing that things were different), no matter how well-intentioned and justified, is that it doesn't lead directly to changes that are actionable and for which the members of the appointing bodies can be held accountable. best, john