Re: I-D Action: draft-hardie-iaoc-iab-update-00.txt

[Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]>]

I'm agreeing with Barry, with one addition ...

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 9:46 PM, Barry Leiba <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> > Let me suggest that instead of delegating the IAB chair responsibilities
> we,
> > instead, change the ex-officio status that the various chairs currently
> have
> > to observer status, change the organizational appointees to permit
> > (require?) appointment from their appointing organizations, and  also add
> > two or three additional permanent members to the IAOC, those members to
> be
> > selected in alternate years by the Nomcom.
>
> First, I think it would be entirely reasonable to add two voting
> members to the IAOC for a couple of reasons:
>
> 1. Temporary absences will be less disruptive.  I'm not sure how much
> of an issue that has actually been on the IAOC, though, so I don't
> know how important this is.
>
> 2. Adding two NomCom-selected voting members would increase the pool
> of potential IAOC chairs to seven (from five).  Making sure there's
> someone on the IAOC who is eligible to chair, willing to chair, and
> capable of chairing is sometimes a difficult issue now.
>
> Now, a variant here:
> In addition to that, the IESG has chatted in the past about ceding its
> appointment to the NomCom, and there was significant support in the
> IESG for such a move (which, yes, would require updating RFC 4071).
> Our thought in the discussion was twofold:
>
> 1. RFC 4071 explicitly says that we are not appointing an IAOC member
> to represent the IESG in any way: we're making the appointment, and
> the IAB is making theirs, but once the appointments are made those
> members act in the same way as the NomCom-appointed ones.
>
> 2. The idea that the IESG should have its own appointment because it
> will look at the candidates differently and will pick with different
> criteria than the NomCom would is valid in theory, but has little or
> no applicability in practice.  In many ways, it would be better to let
> the NomCom balance its choices while selecting two (or even three)
> IAOC members at the same time.
>
> There could be one difficulty: If we were to move both the IESG and
> IAB appointments to the NomCom *and* add two new NomCom appointments,
> the NomComs would be selecting three IAOC members each year.  Finding
> suitable candidates would be a challenge.  A big one.  On the other
> hand, the IESG's list of candidates usually includes the incumbent and
> the volunteers that the NomCom didn't select, so, again, there isn't a
> real change there in practice.


I'm remembering being on either the IESG or the IAB during a race condition
with Nomcom because the volunteer lists overlapped significantly (as in,
all but one person under consideration were on both lists), and whichever
body I was on was holding up naming its appointee because we didn't know
who Nomcom was going to pick, and we couldn't ask. We really were
duplicating almost all of Nomcom's work, and the people willing to serve
were filling out two sets of questionnaires which, I suspect, included a
lot of information requested in both places.

So I'm thinking "no real change in practice" is even more true.

Spencer

p.s. I note that if you're on Nomcom, selecting candidates for confirmation
is your only responsibility, while if you're on either the IAB or IESG,
it's competing with other responsibilities, but perhaps other folk
multi-task better than I do ...