Re: Appointment of a Transport Area Director

["Eggert, Lars" <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On Mar 4, 2013, at 23:44, Allison Mankin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Was there something causative about extracting RAI from Transport?

a lot of thought went into making sure that the WGs that went on to form RAI formed a cohesive whole. In hindsight, we should have thought more about how cohesive the set of WGs was that ended up remaining in TSV. After the split, TSV consisted of an assortment of odd WGs without much of a shared identity. 

Moreover, all the WGs that had any sort of direct relation to product features were moved into RAI. (With the exception of storage, but they are their own little clique.) That severely limited the pool of AD candidates from industry, because it's difficult to construct a business case to one's management.

That has been changing over the last year or two, with Google, Apple and others beginning some serious work on extending and enhancing transport protocols in an attempt to improve latencies. Unfortunately, the transport folks at such employers are probably to valuable internally to be able to volunteer.

Finally, let's not forget that this year was a special case, because the incumbent was forced to pull out at a very late stage of the process. This left the community very little time to come up with alternatives. I believe that if that had happened earlier, we would have been able to deepen the pool.

Lars