Re: NomCom 2020 Announcement of Selections

[Loa Andersson <[e-mail]>]

Bron,

I agree with John, I think it is bac practice to discuss names and 
selections.

/Loa

On 23/01/2021 13:09, Bron Gondwana wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2021, at 15:43, John C Klensin wrote:
>> --On Saturday, January 23, 2021 13:29 +1100 Bron Gondwana
>> <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi Rich,
>> >
>> > 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.
>> >
>> > And of course there is a related question here - regardless of
>> > which you think the root cause - because we are an
>> > organisation composed of those who show up.  That question is:
>> >
>> > 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.
>>
>>
>> Bron,
>>
>> Since Rich was one of the candidates, asking him that question
>> may be a bit unfair.  More generally, I think the community
>> might be better off if we avoided second-guessing the Nomcom
>> decisions in terms of specific people and stuck instead with the
>> concerns that Rich described and Jason's response.
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> I would say quite the opposite.  If he'd been selected and had to work 
> with everyone else, then this would be an unfair question, but otherwise 
> I think it's a vital question and deserves to be addressed.
> 
> We see many claims that it would be better to increase the diversity of 
> representation among the leadership of people along certain of the axes 
> along which humans differ, and Rich has specifically taken the time to 
> decry a lack of said diversity in the current leadership (both 
> concluding and incoming).
> 
> I'm actually particularly interested to see whether Rich suggests that 
> he would have been the best choice for the role that he applied for, 
> despite being white, male, cis-gendered and western.  Given those facts, 
> I'm interested in how he squares the request for increased diversity 
> with his candidacy, given that the diversity would by definition have to 
> be created by picking non-{western white male}s for other roles in the 
> leadership.
> 
> You can't divorce the abstract concerns from the concrete underlying 
> constraints.  It's nice to have those concerns in the abstract, but 
> "rough consensus and running code" - you can't have a rough consensus 
> that "we get more type-X person into leadership" without running "we 
> encourage type-X people to run and we choose them when they do".
> 
> I observe a lot of "we should have more of people not like me in 
> leadership, and yet I want to keep my place in leadership" in the world, 
> and it's incongruent.  I don't think Rich's statement of a general goal 
> can stand independent of there existing realistic pathways to achieve 
> that goal, and hence I think it's fair to ask Rich what realistic 
> pathway exists to have delivered a result that he would have been more 
> satisfied with than this one.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Bron.
> 
> 
> --
>    Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
>    [e-mail]
> 
> 

-- 

Loa Andersson                        email: [e-mail]
Senior MPLS Expert                          [e-mail]
Bronze Dragon Consulting             phone: [phone]