--On Thursday, June 27, 2013 10:29 -0700 S Moonesamy <sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > At 09:44 27-06-2013, Eggert, Lars wrote: >> sorry, but it's silly to attempt to propose that remote >> attendees be permitted to volunteer for NomCom without >> defining what defines a remote attendee. > > Agreed. I'm not sure I agree and want to come back to an earlier point -- we should figure out what we really need and want and then see if we can work out the details to make it work. If we conclude --as I think some have suggested-- that we don't want often-remote volunteers on the Nomcom no matter what, or that we don't want people who cannot just about guarantee physical attendance at all relevant meetings to serve on the Nomcom, or that we are unwilling to consider relaxing the current 3 of 5 rule for other reasons, then I'd argue that putting energy into defining appropriate criteria for being a remote attendee is pretty much a waste of time. If we do decide we want to open the door to remote attendees on the Nomcom and later discover that we can't agree on criteria, that is just how it goes. In principle, one could consider the "do we want this" and "what would the criteria be" questions in either order. In practice, I think the former question is the more important and should be considered first because it informs how we really feel about diversity and the role of participants who don't attend a lot of f2f meetings. I also believe that, while I might be very difficult to come up with a perfect definition of remote participation on which we could all agree, coming up with a definite that would be at least as good at discriminating between actual remote participants and contributors and other sorts of folks as the current 3 of 5 rule is at discriminating between those who understand the IETF culture and those who don't. >... --On Thursday, June 27, 2013 13:50 -0400 Scott Brim <scott.brim@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Because of that, weakening requirements for NomCom > participation greatly increases the probability that our > culture will fracture, and our mission statement lose meaning, > before we have a chance to agree on what they should become. > I supported the proposal to require a few old-timers on every > NomCom a few years ago. I'm quite against the idea of > lowering requirements now. I would only entrust the future of > the IETF to those who have enough experience and hard-earned > wisdom to make the difficult decisions that are required. > Those who participate in the process but are not really deep > in the culture are already well-represented through the > vehicles for contributing to the NomCom process. Well, I agree with all of that in principle. In practice, I don't think the combination of a heavy Nomcom workload and long period of commitment with the 3 of 5 rule has served us very well in recent years, especially in terms of guaranteeing that the criteria you think are important are met. I think we would be better off with requirements that made it more feasible for people like you to volunteer to serve on the Nomcom on the basis of long-term understanding of the culture, a history of participating in a diverse collection of WGs, a few less f2f meetings, and some remote participation. Instead, the 3 of 5 rule and those other factors have brought us Nomcoms with a large fraction of the volunteer pool being folks with far less experience and perspective and a need to rely almost completely on questionnaires and interviews rather than knowledge. I don't think those relative newcomers should be excluded either, but I'm concerned when they appear to be dominating the volunteer pool because they are the ones with company support, time on their hands, and no expectations about getting selected for the IESG, IAN, or IAOC if they don't volunteer for the Nomcom. It is certainly possible that considering and making some changes could make things worse. But they could also make things better. And, IMO, merely having a serious conversation about what we would like our criteria to be and what we are trying to optimize is useful. If nothing else, some relative newcomers might learn something useful about the culture from the conversation and how we carry it out. best, john