RE: On diversity in the NomCom

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Tuesday, July 14, 2020 22:54 +0000 Andrew Campling
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 14-Jul-20 21:57, Brian E Carpenter
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> I'd also like to challenge the assumption that the result is
>> necessarily bad.
>> 
>> If the IETF was a more typical SDO, we'd be funded by
>> membership subscriptions and we might  well have voting
>> weighted by membership categories. So big companies would
>> have  proportionate power. For good reasons, we don't do
>> that. Nevertheless, the fact is that big  companies can (and
>> do) send more people, and provide more sponsorship (such as
>> hosting  meetings, and funding Area Directors), than small
>> companies. If they didn't get something  back for that, they
>> would complain, or simply withdraw their resources. The
>> chance to have  two people in the NomCom is quite a small
>> "something" IMHO.
> 
> I think that this is a very valid point.  I do wonder though
> whether there may be an opportunity to inject a little more
> diversity into the process by requiring the second NomCom
> member from any organisation to be based in a different
> continent than the first?  This shouldn't be too onerous for
> big companies as their operations will typically have
> multinational if not global scope.  It would be even better to
> have limits on the total number of NomCom members from a given
> country and/or continent but at least seeking some diversity
> from within companies would be a good start.

I'm not sure that is the right problem to solve.  First, some
big companies who have multinational operations may not have
technical Internet operations in as many countries as they have
operations of any type, so the effect of such a rule might
easily be to limit them to a single Nomcom member where the
randomization process would have given them too.  Those same
companies often move people around for either short or long
appointments in different facilities.  That can lead to the sort
of hairsplitting that I think we are best off avoiding rather
than trying to make rules to cover every case (or require us to
give the Chair sufficient discretion to make at least some of us
anxious).  For example, assume the first person selected from a
given company is in country A.  The second person is a citizen
of country B but is on a long-time assignment, perhaps nominally
a permanent one, in country A.  Eligible or not?   If that is a
short-term appointment for, say, less than a year, but they
normally work in country B, does that change the eligibility?
Conversely, suppose the second person is a citizen of country A
working in country B?   Are they eligible?  Or suppose they
normally work in country A but transfer to country B.   How long
before or after the first Nomcom list is drawn from the pool is
it ok for them make that move and be eligible because there is
already someone on the Nomcom list from that company and country
A?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but I'm
fairly sure that trying to lay out all of the cases (the above
is certainly not a complete list) and make rules for each would
be crazy-making and that we would still encounter an edge case.


So I don't think we should go there regardless of the advantages
of perceived demographic diversity unless we are really, really
sure that those advantages would be worth the pain.

Let me suggest something different, and a different kind of
diversity, that has come up before in other forms.  Assume that
we can agree that the current 6 of 10 situation is a problem.  I
think it could then actually be three rather different problems:

(1) Absent the kinds of geographical you suggest, it may reduce
geographical diversity.

(2) I recognize what Brian is saying and may have more to say
about it when I get my thoughts together, but the very fact that
a disproportionate fraction of the Nomcom puts us at risk of a
Nomcom with certain types of biases that typically go with such
companies.  For example, suppose there are two candidates for a
given slot on the IESG.  Both are qualified from the standpoint
of prior IETF participation and leadership at the WG level and
both are technical leaders in the relevant area.   One of them
believes quite passionately that the IETF has gotten too complex
and too expensive in which to participate and that it should be
an objective to reduce complexity, costs, time commitments
needed to participate in the leadership, and so on.   The other
has spent most of her or his career in large companies with
generous travel support and generous support for the IETF and
similar bodies.  All thing being equal, one would expect a
Nomcom most of whose members come out of those large (and
generous) company environments to be less sympathetic to the
problems the first person identifies with and hence less
sympathetic to that person than would be the case for a Nomcom
with more diversity of organization types, occupational
categories, etc.

(3) Typically, these bigger companies tend to have much of their
technical interests --at least as represented by the people they
support to participate in  the IETF-- in a relatively small
number of IETF areas.  To the extent that is true and their two
Nomcom members (or five or six of the group from that collection
of companies), that face may reduce the diversity of the Nomcom
with regard to Areas (both in the IETF sense and areas of work
more generally), reducing the range of perspectives about what
is important, where the Nomcom should spend its time getting
things just right, and what expertise is available in the Nomcom
for candidate evaluation.

It is not impossible to address the third and still stick to
objective criteria.  One could ask volunteers for the Nomcom to
identify, not just an employer but the not more than two IETF
Areas in which they most strongly identify and/or have done most
of their work.  One could then think about a rule much like the
one you suggested about geography: if a given company already
had one volunteer seated who was associated with a given Area,
any other candidates from that company who came to the top of
the queue would be disqualified unless they identified with a
different area.     If that information were made public --it
certainly should not be a secret -- it would be hard to game
(and much less complex than sorting out geography) because its
not passing a laugh test would be grounds for a challenge.  

I don't know whether having that sort of criterion would be a
good idea, but I believe that examining it would be, at least, a
useful thought experiment and that more diversity in the Nomcom
along those lines would be useful in practice.

best,
   john