On the general question of compensation for “volunteer” roles, I can speak from experience that it’s a mixed bag— complicates some things, simplifies others. In the ICANN case, the compensation isn’t even close to a reasonable consulting rate for the workload involved, even before the opportunity cost of the conflicts of interest for someone who works in the field. But the compensation makes it easier to sign up for someone who is self-employed, retired, or otherwise not in a position to do the job as part of salaried employment, so it can add to the diversity of the pool. (People serving while they held salaried jobs were generally barred by their employer from accepting the additional compensation.) At the same time, it’s not pocket change and can add to the challenge of remaining both “independent” and a fiduciary of the corporation. There’s also a significant base of experience on whether corporate directors should be compensated, how much, and how to tell whether compensation is improving the candidate pool or the competence of the resulting board. At least in the US, there’s a small industry, within business academia and consulting, specifically on the “professionalization” of the role of corporate director. In my view this has nothing at all to do with the question of enabling more qualified people to serve as IETF leadership. ADs and even IAB members are not directors in the corporate sense; the legal responsibility in particular is vastly different. Making sure that there’s no compensation from the community specifically for the role of AD means we get mostly people with corporate support, along with occasional “pure” volunteers who rely on other means for paying their bills. This mostly rules out people who don’t have salaried corporate jobs with interested or generous companies, and keeps people whose incentives within the IETF and their salaried jobs are at least roughly aligned. If we want different people or to align different interests, “follow the money” is reasonably part of the analysis. It does strike me as naïve to pretend that people aren’t paid for their IETF work one way or another, or that their IETF service isn’t aligned with their other commitments and interests, or that discussing compensation from other sources somehow creates an issue we don’t otherwise have around finding people with enough incentive to take on these time-consuming and difficult “volunteer” roles. Suzanne |
