[Eligibility-discuss] Suggestions for nomcom chair selection?

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

I'm the President and CEO of the Internet Society (ISOC), and I'm writing with that hat on; but this account is where my IETF mail subscriptions generally are so it's more convenient to use this address.

One of the things that I have been reflecting on in the discussions about nomcom eligibility is that it would also affect the pool for nomcom chair availability.  As you probably know, I'm responsible to appoint the nomcom from year to year as part of my job.  When I am replaced, that person will take over the responsibility.

My job pulls me ever more away from the IETF, and I found it challenging to recruit and appoint the last two chairs.  I am grateful that, in my estimation, I was able to get two people to volunteer that I thought were well-qualified and likely to do a good job, but I'm also aware that my familiarity with the IETF community is decreasing over time.  This is in part due to the way the LLC has been designed, which I always understood as intending to create a little more distance between the Internet Society and the IETF.  In keeping with that institutional design, I have been limiting my own participation; and ISOC has adopted a number of policies to ensure that it is not possible for others to mistake staff participation as ISOC control or dominance of the IETF.  But, this means that the informal networks of connections that have historically bound the IETF and ISOC are perhaps not as strong as they once were.  In any case, an IETF with very different nomcom eligibility criteria will mean different criteria for nomcom chairs, too, so this seems like a good time to try to describe some sort of community mechanism to inform the nomcom chair selection.  I could try it out for the next year, to see whether it might be practical.

The trouble I have is that I don't really know where to start except with the approaches I have, which are mostly informal and depend upon the social-professional networks I have as well as those of others.  That seems like a poor foundation on which to build, so I thought I'd ask to see whether people here have other suggestions for a starting point.

Thanks and best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]