Re: Appointment of a Transport Area Director

[Mary Barnes <[e-mail]>]

And, I continue to support Sam's position as well.

To me the question at hand is whether it will do more harm to fill the
position with someone that doesn't have the specific expertise that
his being sought than to leave the position unfilled.   Having dealt
with the exact same issue when I was Nomcom chair, I thoroughly
understand the issue at hand.  And, certainly, there was a lot of
criticism of the choice of the Nomcom I chaired, but we really are
between a rock and a hard place yet again.

Regards,
Mary.

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Sam Hartman <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>>>> "Eliot" == Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> writes:
>
>     Eliot> Sam,
>     Eliot> On 3/4/13 6:34 PM, Sam Hartman wrote:
>
>     Eliot> We're here because of the extremely specialized nature of
>     Eliot> transport.  PhDs who specialize in it have gotten it wrong.
>     Eliot> One such person drove Van Jacobson into the field, as I
>     Eliot> recall. There are very few people who get it right.  And yet
>     Eliot> it's so close to the waist of the hour glass that it's
>     Eliot> critical to get right.  Security has a lot of visibility and
>     Eliot> so it will never have this very same problem.
>
> I absolutely agree that there are few people who can design certain
> aspects of transport protocols.
> (I'll note that security has this problem too: designing crypto is
> really hard; I wouldn't be too quick to be sure that transport is so
> much more difficult than the hardest problems of other areas.)
>
> Fortunately, an AD need not do all the work in their area; they only
> need to review it.
>
> The entire IETF is founded on the idea of consensus. Central to that is
> the idea that we can get together as a group and by doing so we'll come
> up with better specifications.  Not every person will be able to design
> the inputs to that process: new proposals and discoveries of problems in
> existing proposals.  Some aspects of that really do require expert
> knowledge.
>
>
> my claim is that the AD skill set should be focused around evaluating
> these inputs, coming up with an opinion, and explaining that opinion to
> others. I don't believe that reviewing internet-drafts in transport,
> reviewing reviews of thoes drafts, evaluating whether enough review has
> happened, making an informed opinion about issues that were raised and
> explaining that opinion to the community requires the same level of
> expertise in transport as designing TCP.  It does require significant
> experience, both technical and management.
>
> I stand behind my original comments.