Re: Appointment of a Transport Area Director

[Mary Barnes <[e-mail]>]

Lars,

Do you not have individuals in the directorate that are experts on
congestion control (that aren't document authors) that can review for
technical sanity of the proposal?  ISTM that some of the TSV nominees
have broad technical skills, including management that could be quite
useful.  Certainly, we have an example where a Nomcom appointed
someone with little expertise for a specific area and the result was
not good. However, I believe that was far more to do with how the
individual approached the role - authoritarian versus understanding
that from a technical perspective they should really listen to the
experts.  IMHO, that's the most important skill that some ADs lack -
i.e., listening.

In my experience at not all ADs carefully scrutinize WG items and they
tend to rely on the write-up of the shepherd.  While the shepherd is
most often the WG chair, if they do their job properly, I believe that
the problems that an AD might encounter are fewer.   I will note that
from what I have seen not all shepherds actually review the documents
themselves, which is a problem unto itself. There is often quite
visible when one does gen-art reviews.   ISTM, there is a way for the
process to work with an AD that is not the technical expert in
specific areas IF others down the chain do their jobs properly.  Of
course, IETF is really bad at managing down the chain when there are
weak links. IMHO, someone with decent project management and people
management skills can make a huge difference.

Regards,
Mary.


On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Eggert, Lars <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mar 3, 2013, at 15:35, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> What I'm getting at is that this line of argument doesn't scale.
>> The only solution I see is to replace it by
>> "Several people on the Y Directorate need to understand X."
>
> only if the Y directorate reviews all IDs going through the IESG. Which in itself is a scaling issue. It may work for some topics, but things will fall through the cracks for various reasons.
>
> IMO congestion control is important and fundamental enough that the IESG itself needs to have the knowledge. YEs, I'm biased.
>
> Lars