Re: [Eligibility-discuss] Review of draft-carpenter-eligibility-expand-06

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

I'm always wary about jumping into discussions where I'm acting as 
chair, but given that I don't think I'll be calling consensus on 
anything substantive in this document as one of the gendispatch chairs, 
I think I can safely take my hat off to give a bit of input below. If 
someone feels otherwise, let me know and I'll be happy to hand the reins 
to Francesca for any of the gendispatch discussion.

On 30 Oct 2020, at 15:27, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> There is a remaining sense of doubt, I think, about
> path 3 (authorship) but I didn't see a concrete proposal to change
> it.

I think path 3 is perfectly reasonable as part of the experiment, and 
might be fine in the long term. Let me try to allay that remaining sense 
of doubt:

As part of the experiment, we are pretty sure that nobody in the last 5 
years has gamed the system in anticipation of this experiment by getting 
their name in the author list of a document in hopes of getting on a 
NomCom. Given that, the enfranchisement (I hate that word in this 
context, but whatever) of authors who do regularly participate in the 
IETF I think is more likely to increase good than the potential for 
"honorary" authors to increase badness by putting their names in for 
NomCom. (Given other discussion, I think it would be perfectly 
reasonable to add anyone who appeared in a Contributors section if such 
a section appears, but no need to decide that for the next version of 
the draft.)

I also think a good thing to add to the experiment is a design team to 
do an informal review of the past couple of years of RFCs and see they 
can determine how many "honorary" authors there have been versus actual 
contributors. We might also look to see if that number increases or 
decreases during the experiment. I suspect (with no evidence) that the 
number and percentage is actually pretty low, and in fact will get lower 
once chairs start realizing that the experiment is going on and might 
start pushing back on such "honorary" authors. Therefore, I think over 
the longer term path 3 will have minimal harms.

So I'm very much in favor of keeping path 3. The potential for harm I 
believe is low and the potential for good is pretty high. I also think 
it's one of the few objective metrics we have that might have a good 
correspondence to actual participation.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best