Re: [Gendispatch] How I spend my time as an AD

["Eric Vyncke (evyncke)" <[e-mail]>]

Very well written and quite accurate even from the INT AD point of view.

-éric

From: iesg <[e-mail]> on behalf of Roman Danyliw <[e-mail]>
Date: Wednesday, 4 October 2023 at 15:10
To: Warren Kumari <[e-mail]>, Martin Duke <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail] <[e-mail]>, The IESG <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: How I spend my time as an AD
My narrative version of being AD, https://github.com/rdanyliw/ietf-notes/blob/main/SEC-AD-role-perspective.md, recently sent to SAAG (https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/saag/7VtuR41OM08dlZcy57CYj7pnlvg/)

Roman


From: iesg <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Warren Kumari
Sent: Tuesday, October 3, 2023 11:01 AM
To: Martin Duke <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]; The IESG <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: How I spend my time as an AD

… and here is some additional data to try and give a flavor of what I'm spending my IETF time on.

Note that this is only my IETF time, plus "Email - Misc" (because much of this is intermixed with IETF stuff).

#Exported data from September 24, 2023 to September 30, 2023
#Duration formatted as Text (e.g. 0h 26m)
#Times rounded to nearest minute
#Activity,Duration,Percentage
Email - Misc,6h 49m
IETF: Document Progression,2h 05m
IETF: Email ,13h 42m
IETF: Meetings,3h 21m,9
IETF: Misc,0h 33m
IETF: NOC,2h 46m

It looks like I spent ~29h 16m on IETF stuff, and the majority (20h 30m) was spent on email.
This was out of ~50h worked total, so IETF related stuff took ~76% of my time.

Much of this is squishy time — for example, I was doing IETF: Email while participating in an ICANN Workshop, so I was only partially present in either….

W


On Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 11:57 AM, Warren Kumari <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 1:01 PM, Martin Duke <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
Some people in the community are interested in how ADs spend their time. Here is a data point.

… and here is some data from me: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15vSsL_aD2sMb_SFXmvlXwf781xZ4SfLqT-Mf5YavKqI/edit?usp=sharing

Note: I only did this for 2 days, shortly after a meeting - this means that it isn't hugely representative of an "average" week, but it hopefully at least give a flavor. One thing that I discovered while collecting this data is just how much overhead it involved (which is why it is only 2 days :-)). I'm somewhat ADHD, and the context switching of "Do something, record something, do something, record something" was crushing. It was also very unclear how I would count almost all of the items.

As an example, after aggressive filtering I get ~250 emails per day - these are spread across email lists which I'm on because I'm an AD, email lists which I'd read anyway, ICANN mail, corporate mail, etc. If I read an email about a draft in DNSOP, is that AD time? Or is general IETF time? I'd probably read it even if I wasn't DNSOP AD, but I'd also likely pay less attention to some of the less interesting replies…

Yesterday I mentioned an OpsAWG draft on the NANOG list - https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2023-September/223301.html . Do I count that as AD / IESG time? I'll end up progressing the document, but I also happen to believe that this draft is really useful, and I would have reported on it either way, so perhaps it's just general IETF time?

On a personal note, I am fairly disappointed (and somewhat hurt) that instead of just *asking* how I spend my time, a BoF was proposed. To me at least, this felt like "Not only are you doing this wrong, but it is so wrong that your input is not useful or needed. We'll design a timecard for you to fill in, and make sure your TPS report is on my desk by Friday."

W




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,