[Gendispatch] How I spend my time as an AD

[Martin Duke <[e-mail]>]

Some people in the community are interested in how ADs spend their time.
Here is a data point.

I am not including the time I spend as a normal IETF participant: writing
drafts, participating in WGs I would attend anyway, and attending IETF
plenary meetings.

These percentages are a rough fraction of a 40-hour workweek, averaged over
the year. I did a time card for my own information three years ago, long
since lost, but this is an estimate based on a little reflection on the
tasks I perform.

8% - Meetings: Telechats, a weekly sync with my co-AD, occasional one-offs
for IEEE syncs, BOF reviews, etc

2% - WG management - finding chairs, occasional 1-on-1s, chartering,
errata, BoFs, monitoring mailing lists, etc. Personally, I tend not to wade
into WG document threads very much, to keep my perspective clear for the AD
review. Others may differ. There was a period I spent about 5% of my time
clearing the errata backlog, but that is long past.

In transport, we do not get many BoFs. I have also been fortunate in having
great WG chairs that can handle most problems, so thank you to them.

3% - AD [document] Evaluation -- With only 5 WGs, I do not have many of
these. I take these really seriously and a review usually takes the better
part of a day, sometimes more. Other ADs almost certainly spend more time
because they have many more documents.

3% - Standards process management: actively participating in policy work --
IESG statements and such -- is essentially optional. I have gotten
interested in certain initiatives. It is certainly possible to spend more
or less time on this.

2% - Retreats. These meetings essentially take a full week, but are
happening only once per year. You could put this in the "standards process
management" bin if you like.

10% - IESG review - Until about a year ago, this consumed substantially
more time for me, as much as 40-50%. For multiple reasons, I've trimmed
this down to focus on documents with transport implications (which is not
many of them). In the context of any particular review, I've reduced my
focus to major problems and any transport issues. For what it's worth, I
don't think this scaling back has meaningfully reduced my impact on the
IETF.

For most ADs, a much larger percentage of ballots have issues pertaining to
their area of expertise. If I applied the same criteria to being SEC AD, I
would probably be spending *at least* 40% of my time on balloting.

*******

In summary, I'm spending about 25%-30% of my workweek on AD-specific stuff.
When I started, it was over 50%. mostly because I was much more thorough on
IESG ballots. An additional chunk of time is spent on being an IETF
participant. Although I participate in more policy work than the bare
minimum, I would say that this level of commitment is pretty close to a
lower bound for competent* execution of the duties because:

- Transport is small: few WGs, not that many documents, largely irrelevant
to most IESG ballots

- I am experienced: I've formed an opinion about what matters and have
stopped doing stuff that I don't think matters.

********

Some closing thoughts:

No one asked me, but I don't think eliminating AD tasks that take <5% of
the week is going to make a difference in recruiting: it's still a matter
of asking your manager to be removed from some dayjob tasks. The real money
is in (1) eliminating lots of working groups; (2) having way more ADs;
and/or (3) fundamentally changing the nature of IESG balloting. All of
these have significant drawbacks.

I will also note that we historically have plenty of AD candidates for some
areas (SEC and RTG) and almost none in others (TSV). It is apparent to me
that this is not just about workload and there are other factors at play,
and the community would benefit from exploring these before taking a
sledgehammer to the generic AD job description.

WG management and AD Evaluation are the most important things I do and
should not be abridged.

If there's one place I regret not spending more time, it's adoption calls
in my WGs. There are several instances where I have AD evaluated a document
that isn't highly objectionable, but that I don't think is a particularly
useful addition to the RFC series.

Martin Duke
Transport AD 2020-2024

* I have received private feedback that my contribution has been reasonably
competent, but others are free to disagree,