--On Saturday, 28 July, 2018 11:27 -0400 Ted Lemon
<mellon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It's interesting that it's seen by quite a few people who have
> responded to this idea that an AD who is paid by the IETF
> would be _less_ neutral than an AD who is paid by some company
> that's sending them to the IETF. I would like to think that
> the ADs that nomcom appoints would be neutral in either case,
> but it seems to me that the incentives for an AD to play
> favorites are worse, not better, if the AD works for a company
> than if they are paid by the IETF, all other factors being
> equal. Of course, if companies that want to buy ADs were
> able to do so, that would be bad, but if the funding
> commitment is made in advance of AD selection, I don't see how
> that would happen. Maybe I'm just naive?
Ted,
I don't think this is worth a long discussion and it appears
that most people don't read my in-depth analyses anyway, but
there are a long list of things wrong with your idea, most of
them, as Andrew suggests, proven by bad experience elsewhere.
As just two examples:
* ADs who come from different companies at least have, we hope,
limited incentives to collude. Maybe we should be requiring
most explicit and public disclosures about day job commitments
and entanglements, but one of our protections come from the IETF
being made of of people from competing (or at least
non-affiliated) organizations. If everyone were paid by the
IETF, that safeguard would presumably disappear, leaving people
to promote their own collective ideas.
* Even if you don't believe that, consider the pragmatic issues.
People end up on the IESG at various stages of their careers and
from different career paths. Would you expect all of them to be
paid the same amount or for IETF-supplied salaries to reflect
the most recent day job one? Also, while a company can make a
decision to lend someone to the IETF for a few years and those
who are self-employed can choose to reduce other workloads to
make time for AD responsibilities, if someone is going to take a
salary from the IETF, many (perhaps most) employment agreements
would require that such a person either resign from the day job
or be put on a leave of absence, possibly with guarantees about
being allowed to return. In some cases, the requirement would
be for the salary to be paid by the IETF to the company and for
the ADs to continue to draw their normal salaries, giving the
worst of both worlds -- IETF spending the money with no effect
on real or imagined conflicts of interest. Those kinds of
issues all suggest that, even if "IETF pays ADs" were otherwise
a good idea, which I don't believe it to be, sorting out all of
the issues would be very complex and probably well beyond the
limits of where this community can reach even rough consensus.
Of course, some of those problems would disappear if the ADs
were hired by the IETF and expected to make the IESG a career,
but the latter has not worked out well in the past even without
being complicated by a compensation package.
best,
john
