Re: On diversity in the NomCom

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Earlier on when i had started a thread about the max2 rule suggesting that
its unfair to single out one specific criteria as a limiter, most responses
seemed to go in the direction of "but we had to do it, or else big
companies had too much influence, and: doing more would be too much work".
Aka: any more diversity criteria will be met with a lot of resistance.

As well meaning as those additional criteria are (and i was suggesting
country as another one), this is not going to happen for this NomCom.

What i instead suggest to anyone interested in best NomCom selection output,
is to educate yourself about the candidates and bring your personal
analysis of facts at hand as feedback to NomCom. Look at candidates prior
document reviews, work as chair or other role, author, personal personal interactions
and other relevant background.

Hearsay and tribal marketing "i like candidate foo, because i share tribe
bar with her" is not very useful to NomCom and may easily lead to annoyance
when it is stacked by obvious tribes like company affiliation. Indeed,
this may even backfire for candidates. 

In my experience, the most important feedback for NomCom when i served was
about long held grudges, sometimes as far back as more than one or two decades.
To those who want to bring forward grudges about candidates, i would suggest
to first attempt to have a disccuss about them with the candidate, e.g.:
in PM, and then make up your mind.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 02:37:43PM +0100, Stewart Bryant wrote:
> That is an interesting point, though I am not sure of the specifics of the proposal.
> 
> The IETF is very tribal along area lines with too little interaction between the tribes. Some consideration of areas of interest would be useful in Nomcom so that the special issues that effect the areas are better understood by those taking the decisions. Now I know they can ask, but some background context helps a lot.
> 
> Stewart
> 
> 
> 
> > On 13 Jul 2020, at 14:01, Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > 
> > https://www..ietf.org/topics/areas/ <https://www.ietf.org/topics/areas/>
> > 
> > We have 7 areas by my reading of that page, which are considered so significantly areas of differentiation within the IETF.  I'm interested in topics from various areas but by far I would say my "primary affiliation" within the IETF is ART.
> > 
> > Areas are indeed so important that when you look at the agenda, you see:
> > 
> > 1100-1240  Session I
> > Room 1          	ART 	dispatch    	Dispatch WG - Joint with ARTAREA
> > Room 2          	IRTF	pearg       	Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Research Group 
> > Room 3          	RTG 	spring      	Source Packet Routing in Networking WG
> > Room 4          	SEC 	sacm        	Security Automation and Continuous Monitoring WG
> > Room 5          	SEC 	teep        	Trusted Execution Environment Provisioning WG
> > Room 6          	TSV 	dtn         	Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking WG
> > Room 8          	TSV 	tcpm        	TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions WG
> > 
> > 
> > Right there as almost the most important part of each line is which area the meeting belongs to.
> > 
> > I'd say of the many types of diversity - geographic location, primary language, personal identity, age, length of time involved with IETF, etc... that primary area affiliation would be a valuable thing to have diversity of within the nomcom - particularly since it handles nominations for the directors of these areas - having experience within multiple areas on the committee is valuable.
> > 
> > So there's my two cents towards any rework of the criteria for nomcom eligibility filtration - we should ask people to nominate a primary area and allow no more than say 4 from each area.  In the worst case we would have only 3 areas represented, but right now it could all be from one!
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Bron.
> > 
> > --
> >   Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
> >   [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>

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