> Let me suggest that instead of delegating the IAB chair responsibilities we, > instead, change the ex-officio status that the various chairs currently have > to observer status, change the organizational appointees to permit > (require?) appointment from their appointing organizations, and also add > two or three additional permanent members to the IAOC, those members to be > selected in alternate years by the Nomcom. First, I think it would be entirely reasonable to add two voting members to the IAOC for a couple of reasons: 1. Temporary absences will be less disruptive. I'm not sure how much of an issue that has actually been on the IAOC, though, so I don't know how important this is. 2. Adding two NomCom-selected voting members would increase the pool of potential IAOC chairs to seven (from five). Making sure there's someone on the IAOC who is eligible to chair, willing to chair, and capable of chairing is sometimes a difficult issue now. Now, a variant here: In addition to that, the IESG has chatted in the past about ceding its appointment to the NomCom, and there was significant support in the IESG for such a move (which, yes, would require updating RFC 4071). Our thought in the discussion was twofold: 1. RFC 4071 explicitly says that we are not appointing an IAOC member to represent the IESG in any way: we're making the appointment, and the IAB is making theirs, but once the appointments are made those members act in the same way as the NomCom-appointed ones. 2. The idea that the IESG should have its own appointment because it will look at the candidates differently and will pick with different criteria than the NomCom would is valid in theory, but has little or no applicability in practice. In many ways, it would be better to let the NomCom balance its choices while selecting two (or even three) IAOC members at the same time. There could be one difficulty: If we were to move both the IESG and IAB appointments to the NomCom *and* add two new NomCom appointments, the NomComs would be selecting three IAOC members each year. Finding suitable candidates would be a challenge. A big one. On the other hand, the IESG's list of candidates usually includes the incumbent and the volunteers that the NomCom didn't select, so, again, there isn't a real change there in practice. Barry