On 2/3/2016 2:33 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
I think it is super-important that someone on the IAB is following those matters closely. What is not clear to me is why it needs to be the_chair_.
The word "following" is the essential disparity. It casts the IAB's role as basically passive monitoring. Note, however, that there have already been some comments about the need for real-time decision-making. That's not 'following'.
(In case it hasn't been mentioned, this is at least the second time there has been an effort to replace the IAB Chair's ex-officio role with a surrogate. Arguably, there have been at least two. One was de facto, with the surrogate having 'guest' role in the IAOC. The second was an actual proposal.)
The current proposal offers odd motivations. The logic offered in Section 3 of the draft mostly reduces to "the IAB chair is busy" and "IAB programs have been useful, so let's invoke that model for an operational management position"...
One question is, among the range of activities an IAB Chair does, what makes IAOC participation sufficiently low priority to warrant handing it to someone else?
Worse, the proposal seems to think that an IAB committee doing review is somehow equivalent to one, continuing, deeply knowledge person actually /participating/ in the IAOC's decision-making. (That, at least, is what Section 2 of the draft opens with, noting the designation of a program 'lead' as the sitting IAOC member, almost as an after-thought.)
There is an real dilemma here -- and maybe more than one -- and resolving it/them requires some care.
The job of overseeing administrative activity for an organization isn't all that sexy, but the organization dies if it isn't done properly. So choices for who to have in positions on the committee should attend to background and skillset. This is an operations job and operations is different from design or development.
Start with the question: Why were the IAOC/Trust originally formulated with the ex-officio voting members? I believe the answer is what has already been noted in this thread: each one of those folk carry deep context. Deeper than most surrogates are likely to have. With great regularity, IAOC decisions really do require quite a bit of context and quite a bit of community-oriented thinking. The I* Chairs aren't the only ones embodying those attributes, but they are the only ones embodying them reliably.
Then note that having such a high percentage of the IAOC be the overloaded ex-officio folk means that there are precious few alternatives for IAOC chair or IETF Trust chair, or for leading IAOC-based activities.
My suggestion a few years back, after being on the IAOC for awhile, was to keep the ex-officio folk on tap, for their knowledge, but move them to non-voting positions, and then specify 3 other folk to do the voting. (I think this matches St. John's current suggestion.) In effect, that's a superset of what's being put forward here, but then it's trying to respond to multiple issues. My proposal was dismissed as resulting in too many people on the IAOC/Trust. After repeatedly watching the challenge of getting candidates for IAOC and Trust chairs and for active IAOC member participation in efforts, I'll offer that it's better to have a reasonable-sized pool of active participants.
(As for the draft's form: An effort to make changes here should certainly separate the process of populating the IAOC from any internal steps taken within any of the bodies feeding bodies to the IAOC.)
On 2/2/2016 6:30 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
I think the IETF Chair slot is a different matter. Yes, the IETF Chair is also the IESG Chair, but I don't believe s/he is in the IAOC on behalf of the IESG.
The concept that any voting member of the IAOC is 'representing' anyone other than the entire IETF strikes me as odd and during my time on the IAOC I don't recall anyone appearing to have a more narrow focus of concern.
I think the ISOC President slot is also a different matter, and a bit tricky. I don't think we can declare our "funding agency" to be a non-voting member.
Arguably, they shouldn't be voting members, but then neither should anyone on staff. In both cases, having a vote invites potential conflict of interest situations. (Reminder: CoI is about the /potential/ for conflict in goals from the organizational positions; it's not about specific people.)
And just to offer some variety: the ISOC and staff representatives often are the only ones with much direct management experience...
d/