On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:42:00AM -0400, Barry Leiba wrote: > I have no doubts about that. A NomCom position is often considered a > "leadership position" by one's sponsor or manager -- it is, after all, > an HR job. To get into other leadership positions in the IETF, one > has to build up reputation over time, and then be selected for it. To > get a NomCom position, one need only volunteer, and -- these days, > with 100 volunteers -- one has a 10% chance, more or less, of getting > it.
This sounds to me like a claim that there are organizations out there that are measuring one's career progress in terms of getting "leadership positions" in the IETF. Is the real worry here that the IETF is gradually being taken over by professional standards people as opposed to those who happen to be working on standards as a side effect of the "real" work they're doing? If so, I confess that I think this is so much windmill-tilting. The Internet is a much more mature technology than it once was, and therefore much greater conservatism creeps in. With such conservatism naturally comes additional specialization, which means that there will be increased involvement from a kind of specialist standardizer that was historically in the minority. I doubt we can really prevent this happening if, as you say, there are workplaces out there where getting a position on the Nomcom is an important career milestone. As an aside, I'll note that IETF activities were always regarded in any job I had (including the present) as a kind of side project, tangential to the main tasks (i.e. the ones that actually make the employer money). From experience in attempting to wring reviews and updated I-D text out of working group participants, I'd say that the same is mostly true of other IETF participants in the DNSEXT WG. Whether DNS is unusual in this regard, I don't know. > general chair. There's no guarantee that a NomCom with "enough" > experienced people will not choose some poorly suited persons for > leadership roles, but we think it's unlikely for such a NomCom to go > *too* far wrong with too many of their selections. I've heard this off-list, too. I want evidence. In my opinion, some past Nomcoms made some clanger bad decisions. (I'm sure we all have our favourite examples.) On what basis would we say that it would have turned out worse or better had the Nomcom been constituted differently? Even supposing that the semantics of counterfactuals were the sort of thing about which everyone agreed, there are so many variables that I'm not even sure where to start telling the alternate-universe story. It is entirely natural, I think, that people who have experience with the IETF think that their insights into how the IETF works will necessarily lead to better leadership selection. I also believe that my observations of the past would be helpful in making the right decisions in the future. In point of fact, however, I make bad decisions all the time. Maybe I'm just especially bad a this sort of thing, and others are more likely to apply correctly the lessons they've learned. In addition, there are surely going to be second-order effects of dividing the Nomcom into two classes. Once someone is designated as one of the "experienced" seats, won't it be natural for that person to start dismissing objections from the "less experienced" as simply the foolish objections of the naive? (Anyone even casually acquainted with the operation of any university department will be familiar with this effect.) Moreover, if the goal is to dilute the influence of the professional IETF wonk (see above), this policy will have the opposite effect: it will encourage people to do more of the things to meet the "checklist" for being "experienced", thereby pervesely actually undermining the absorbtion of IETF culture (whatever that is). Indeed, it will make marks of experience more valuable, which means that it will have the effect of _encouraging_ people to "run for office". The latter seems to be another thing the draft is aiming at preventing, and this plan will make the aim even harder to achieve. More rules -- even simple ones -- are always a greater favour to bureaucrats and professional wonks than to everyone else. Sometimes (even often), that cost is worth paying. But I am not convinced even a little that it is worth it in this case. A -- Andrew Sullivan a...@shinkuro.com Shinkuro, Inc. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
