Re: NomCom 2020 Announcement of Selections

["Salz, Rich" <[e-mail]>]

  *   You make some very interesting points here.  I'm interested in whether you think the issue is with the pool of available candidates who put their hands up for roles, or with the selection process not valuing diversity sufficiently.

It would have been nice to have a more diverse pool of candidates. I cannot speak about the internal deliberations of Nomcom, and I won’t, but to me, the net result is disappointing. Put another way, and I am only saying it like this to make it hopefully more obvious “given what they had to work with, they could have done better.”


  *   of the available candidates, if you had the choice, who would you have selected instead of those who were chosen?  i.e. what would your "perfect" slate have been, given the candidates that were available.

I will not answer that for a couple of reasons.  First, as I stated originally, I have no qualms with any of the individuals. Making my own slate would necessarily leave some of the selected people who, and – rightfully so – lead people to think that I did have issues with anyone left off. Second, as an IETF contributor, I will have to work with many of the current slate and I don’t see how answering that question could do anything except cause friction. Third, I don’t have enough information: I didn’t do any interviews, questionnaires are not public (well, mine was), and there was no chance to talk with a bunch of candidates.  (That last is a separate problem.)

Your point – we can’t take about fixing problems without concrete examples – is compelling, but flawed. As a CEO, I am sure that you know you can change hiring practices to get a more desirable output, without reviewing everyone who was just hired.