leadership bodily presence requirements (was: Re: Want to be on the IESG?)

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Just my 2c on one aspect for the discussion about the lacking amount of
accepted nominations to leadership position on this years Nomcom process:

Maybe i am not reading the right mailing lists, but:

I am not aware of any public mailing list discussion as to whether the pre-covid
leadership bodily presence requirements should indeed be the requirements going forward.

I can observe that at jobs thats delivering a paycheck (aka: not IETF), certain
roles where never considered appropriate for full-remote workers and that has changed
due to covid.

I can also easily see how existing IETF leadership body members themselves would
really prefer to return to the old normal, but i am a lot more uncertain if those
body members past-experience based preferences should really
be the sole leading guidance for our NomCom preferences. Right now they are,
aka: NomCom would not accept candidates who would only be able to participate
remotely based on those existing body members prescribed preferences.

Personally i think that if we do not try even a single-term experiment
full-time-telecommuting leadership body member NOW, when it is likely that
a lot of normal-in-person-meetings will be remote anyhow, then i am certain
that we will not do it EVER - unless we really are forced to continue operate
fully remotely much much longer.

Of course, the inability to attend sometimes in person may not make much of
a difference for a job like IESG where arguably the time commitment is the
much more difficult requirement to meet, but IMHO it would be perfectly
valid to experiment with full-time-remote IAB membership for example. And
outside of NomCom leadership equally for WG chairs.

Of course, i am quite biased towards thinking that remote participationship
is not a problem if just tooling is good enough; and we have a 30 year
history of building protocols, networks, tools an recommendations for it.

Do i prefer in-person attendance ? Very much so. But for leadership i would
also like to see more diversity, and especially for possible candidates
from academia and a more diverse part of the industry that where the
candidate but not the sponsor is valuing the IETF engagement, IMHO 
air travel will become more and more an issue than it was 30..20 years
ago, when i think we had more diverse participation (e.g.: more from
universities for example). 

Cheers
    Toerless