--On Thursday, September 27, 2018 04:27 -0700 S Moonesamy
<sm+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> There is a plethora of articles/blogs... out there about
>> diverse interview panels being key to achieving diversity.
>
> I read some articles about the topic.
Padma,
I'm reasonably familiar with that literature and some of the
underlying studies and have been quite impressed with both the
diversity outcome and general quality ones by other measures.
Whether it is usefully applicable to the IETF nominations and
selection process is another matter; see below.
>> Today, AFAIK (I may be wrong or unaware of unwritten rules)
>> it seems that company affiliation is the main diversity
>> factor.
>
> Affiliation is part of the (written) selection criteria.
More precisely, it is, at least AFAIK, the only easily-measured
factor in the rules other than the basic "Nomcom eligibility"
ones.
>> Undoubtedly, this is a good start but surely it can be
>> augmented for other diversity considerations as well such as
>> gender parity...
>...
>> If we are committed on diversity and enlarging the pool of
>> candidates then possible starting points could be
>...
>> 1. More diversity on the interview panels and other levels
>> contributing to key selection criteria
>...
> The first point would be challenging. There is an existing
> mentorship programme (point 2). As for point 3, please see
> draft-klensin-nomcom-incumbents-first-00.
Since one of my efforts to sort through pieces of this (it went
nowhere, and so did all of its relatives) was cited, let me
address that first, challenging, point.
I think what has gotten lost in this piece of the discussion is
that the Nomcom isn't an "interview panel", it is a selection
mechanism and panel. Perhaps more important, when the mechanism
of selection by a Nominations Committee was established, there
were two key assumptions about that committee.
First, the Nomcom membership was expected to represent a random
sample of IETF participants. At least implicitly, part of that
expectation was that the workload and duration would be
sufficiently low that the people who would volunteer would be a
good enough sample of the community that a random selection of
them would closely approximate a good random sample of the
community. That is almost certainly no longer the case: Nomcoms
are a lot of work for their members, requiring very active
involvement for many months. That, in turn, biases the pool
toward people who have unlimited time to devote to the IETF, who
do not have significant other IETF responsibilities (e.g., for
technical work, as WG Chairs, etc.), and, for people with
significant organizational/employer commitments, whose
organizations are willing to support Nomcom-type work.
Second, there was an assumption --again, at least implicit--
that Nomcom members would actually know, and often would have
worked with, most of the plausible candidates for IESG and IAB
positions and therefore be able to rely on their own knowledge
and make selections by discussing that knowledge and
experiences. Perhaps at least in part because of the changes
above and because the IETF has simply gotten bigger with more
participants who are specialized in one particular area, that is
no longer the case. As a result (I think) Nomcoms are
increasingly dependent on questionnaires (another problem, IMO,
interviews, and recommendations/endorsements rather than
first-hand knowledge of candidates by members. Those approaches
are inherently time-consuming, reinforcing the
statistically-biased membership described above.
Given that backdrop, I doubt that one could tinker with
selection criteria for the Nomcom (beyond the "no more than two
from a company" rule) without making the Nomcom even less
representative of the community. In other words, one might
increase one type of (easily-measured) diversity there at the
expense of decreasing overall representativeness and range of
experience and perspectives.
Now I think that it may be time to rethink the Nomcom model,
including the random selection idea, entirely, but I have seen
little or no sign of energy in the community for dealing with
that ... and no good ideas for consideration either.
best,
john
