On Oct 8, 2021, the IESG communicated its decision [1] to prolong the
RFC8989 experiment for a second and final year, for the 2022-23
NomCom cycle, i.e., choosing option 2 in Section 2 of RFC8989 [2]. At
that time, no additional clarifications were foreseen for the
continuation of this experiment. Since that decision was
communicated, the IESG has identified two items it wishes to clarify
in regard to the continuation of the RFC8989 experiment.
First, RFC8989 [2] defines attendance-based "path1" eligibility as
follows:
Path 1: The person has registered for and attended 3 out of
the last 5 IETF meetings. For meetings held entirely
online, online registration and attendance count as
attendance. For the 2021-2022 NomCom, the meetings
concerned will be IETF 106, 107, 108, 109, and 110.
Attendance is as determined by the record keeping of the
Secretariat for in-person meetings and is based on being a
registered person who logged in for at least one session of
an online IETF meeting.
The text above only counts online attendance in fully-online meetings,
where all participants are remote, towards establishing NomCom
eligibility. However, IETF 113 was and IETF 114 will be a hybrid
meeting: a meeting with an in-person component but with noticeably
fewer people onsite than pre-COVID. Future meetings beyond IETF 114
are likely to remain hybrid for the foreseeable future. This move to
hybrid meetings was still unclear when the IESG announced the
continuation of the RFC8989 experiment on Oct 8, 2021.
A strict interpretation of RFC8989 would only consider the in-person
component of a hybrid meeting for establishing NomCom eligibility.
However, the IESG believes this interpretation would disqualify a
sizable fraction of the NomCom pool, especially for the next 2023-24
cycle. For example, 233 people would lose path 1 eligibility for the
current 2022-23 NomCom cycle if online participation in IETF 113 did
not count towards NomCom eligibility. Of those, only 14 qualify
through path 2 (WG leadership) or path 3 (document authorship).
Therefore, we intend to count participation in either in-person or
online components of hybrid meetings during the 2022-23 NomCom cycle
towards establishing path 1 NomCom eligibility.
Second, as part of the preparations to calculate NomCom eligibility
for the currently starting NomCom cycle, the IETF Tools Team
discovered an old bug that affected the calculation of NomCom
eligibility for path 1. The bug was introduced in March 2020, when
IETF 107 was converted to a fully-online meeting. The bug overwrote
the information about whether a registered online participant
actually attended at least one session. In other words, it caused
registration for online attendance to be sufficient to make that
meeting count towards NomCom eligibility along path 1.
For the eligibility calculation for the starting 2022-23 NomCom cycle,
this bug will be fixed by restoring the overwritten data and
correctly taking session attendance into account for path 1
eligibility, as RFC8989 intended. Note that this will make the data
gathered during this NomCom cycle somewhat more difficult to compare
to the last one, but that seems the correct tradeoff in this case.
For clarity, the IESG intends to use the following revised definition
of path 1 for the continuation of the RFC8989 experiment during the
current 2022-23 NomCom cycle:
Path 1: The person has registered for and attended 3 out of
the last 5 IETF meetings. Online registration and
attendance count as attendance. For the 2022-2023 NomCom,
the meetings concerned will be IETF 109, 110, 111, 112, and
113. Attendance is as determined by the record keeping of
the Secretariat for in-person participants, and for online
participants is based on being a registered person who
logged in for at least one session of an IETF meeting.
We invite feedback on these clarifications on the
[email protected] mailing list, or by direct email to the
IESG at [email protected] by July 22, 2022.
We would also like to remind the community that NomCom eligibility is
a topic of the IETF 114 meeting of the GENDISPATCH working group,
with a goal of determining whether a more permanent replacement to
the RFC8713 NomCom eligibility guidelines [3], based on the RFC8989
experiment, should be undertaken.
Lars Eggert
IETF Chair
[1]
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/DL8xzp4J0kAwXImbqx66aI2oIw4/
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8989
[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8713
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