On 7/28/18 1:56 PM, Toerless Eckert wrote: > First of all, just because the IETF pays support doesn't meant > the person becomes an employee of the IETF. This should rather be > handled as it is for politicians (and hopefully the amount of time > in an AD role is short enough that there will be no entrenchment > to the financing body). You might want to chat with someone from the US about money and politicians. Anyway, it's not at all clear to me that a funded position is necessarily funded by the IETF or ISOC - there may be opportunities to get support funding from an outside charitable organization/foundation as a way to broaden IETF leadership (I believe that the narrowness and homogeneity of the candidate pool for I* positions narrows the scope and effectiveness of the IETF, as well). That said, I suspect that this is another problem space in which the law of unintended consequences will tend to dominate and I would guess that adding a professional technical staff to the IETF will change the character of the organization, and not for the better. I am rather certain that there are a number of other ways in which the problem of a shallow candidate pool can be addressed, many of which will not carry the same risks (say, for example, reducing our dependence on meetings, changing the document review and publication process, improving the technical chops in some of the directorates, etc.). Melinda
