Re: Appointment of a Transport Area Director

[Henning Schulzrinne <[e-mail]>]

While the IETF is unique in many ways, the staff-volunteer issue isn't all that unique. Many organizations face this. As one example, organizations like IEEE and ACM struggle with this. (For example, they have, over the years, delegated many functions in conference management that used to be done by volunteers to paid staff.) Even government regulatory bodies operate with a mixture of volunteer labor (advisory councils) and paid staff. The solution space seems rather constrained:

(1) Fish in the shallow pool of full-time "volunteers" who have a large corporate sponsor. Risk that the corporate sponsor wants something in return.

(2) Pay the person a salary while on leave from their home institution/employer. As an example, NSF and DARPA do this for their program managers. The employer still takes a hit and there's some risk to the person that they won't get their job back, but it allows a larger number of individuals to participate.

(3) Scale back the responsibilities of the individual to make it a 10-20% job. Senior technical or regulatory staff don't read every document line-by-line or, for a conference chair, read every paper, but focus on key issues, by asking questions and relying on more junior staff/volunteers to prepare briefings, for example.

Financially, (1) and (2) aren't all that different financially, except that the money flow is more opaque than an explicit "tax".

I don't think that adding tools helps except at the margins, and only in combination with changing the process. Also, this is not likely to work for just one area. You can't easily have one AD do grammar and spelling corrections on every IANA registration draft, and another just do big-think.

Henning

On Mar 5, 2013, at 11:46 AM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 
> On 3/5/2013 8:42 AM, Eggert, Lars wrote:
>> Finally, let's not forget that this year was a special case,
> 
> 
> I'm going to strongly suggest that that is both wrong and counter-productive to claim.
> 
> As Mary (and I) noted, TSV has been at a crisis level to fill for some years now, but I believe it is merely the most extreme of a broader problem.
> 
> Other areas often have very, very thin candidate pools.  And none of this is new.
> 
> d/
> -- 
> Dave Crocker
> Brandenburg InternetWorking
> bbiw.net
>