All, It is relatively unusual for two ADs in the same area to have the same company affiliation. Although, of course, ADs discard their affiliations in consideration of all elements of their AD role, we are aware that this situation may cause some concern and unease. Therefore we have decided to err on the side of caution, remind everyone of the normal practices that take into account affiliations, and put in place some operating guidelines that we will endeavor to follow while this situation exists. We should note that this situation will not last for more than the next year: Adrian absolutely will not be seeking reselection as an AD at the end of this year (March 2015). First, whenever anyone has a concern of actual or potential bias by us as ADs, we will encourage such a concern to be reported to us and to the IETF chair. In such circumstances, we will supply the chair with as much information as we have and will abide by the chair's decision as to what action we should take. We would like to remind you of the following standard practices: - As has become the normal practice in the Routing Area, the ADs will depend heavily on the diverse Routing Area Directorate to provide public, non-biased and critical reviews of all Routing Area documents. We will be conscious of the affiliation of the reviewers when requesting reviews. - Different affiliations between the working group chairs of any single working group is always considered desirable. Here are our additional operating guidelines for the following rare cases: - When a document has authors with only one affiliation and that is ours, even though there is a mitigating effect of WG chairs and document shepherds, we will ask another AD to act as responsible AD. This may have the effect of slowing the progress of such documents. - Whenever there are contentious IPR issues related to a document in the Routing Area we will seek public guidance from another AD. Whenever the contentious IPR is owned by Juniper we will ask another AD to act as responsible AD. - Whenever there is significant disagreement within a working group in which there is a strong view held by participants affiliated with Juniper, and where the AD is called upon to guide or instruct the chairs, we will always seek public input from another AD. - In the event of any complaints made against WG chairs in the Routing Area where those chairs are affiliated to Juniper we will always seek input from other another AD with as much public visibility as the complaint. Please be aware that for Adrian this represents a change in normal automatic processing that he has developed over 5 years. For Alia the challenge is that she will be on the steep learning curve that all new ADs go through. Please excuse any fumbles, draw them to our attention and allow us to rectify them. May we both take this opportunity to thanks Stewart for his excellent service as an AD over the last four years. Alia and Adrian