At 06:24 PM 10/7/2014, IETF Chair wrote:
We are committing to coming up with a proposal to the community
for that by May 2015. We believe the end result of that could be to reduce the
number of areas by one.
In the short term, however, we would like to advise the NomCom to *not* fill
the APP AD vacancy in this NomCom cycle.
I've read most of the other responses on this thread and I agree that the APPs
area is in need of attention and I applaud the desire to restructure.
However, I'm concerned that we are proposing to not follow our own rules.
The first issue is that once the IETF ExecDir passes on the vacancies to the
Nomcom, there is no provision for the Nomcom not to fill those vacancies, nor
is there provision for that vacancy list to change. The IESG could have
changed the vacancy slate any time up to the announcement of vacancies (29 Aug
according to what I saw), but delayed making the decision for a month past the
deadline. That's not insoluble, but it disturbs me that we're attempting to
use exception processing rather than what's programmed in.
The second issue (related to other comments) is that 3777 has no provision for
appointing anyone for a term of a year or less. Again, not insoluble, but begs
the question of why we have rules if we don't follow them.
Other comments, especially JCK's, have noted that the work will not decrease as
there will continue to be some similar number of WGs and questioning on that
basis the desire to not appoint a new APPs AD.
Instead, let me suggest the IESG put its head together and figure out where a
more general AD might be of use for two years. Given the large number of cross
area WGs, perhaps re-working the job description into husbanding the transition
of some number of as yet to be defined WGs to the different areas might be
useful and might actually be a 2 year task. Or other tasks related to the
closure of the area that will no doubt occur to the IESG between now and next
year. Also, AFAIK, there is no requirement that a WG be owned by one of the
area directors of its primary area - stick the APPs AD as the primary owner
for the WG, but pick a secondary owner from the gaining area to ease
transition. (I would thing that you should be doing this now for the WGs owned
by the continuing APPs AD if you expect to close out the area next year )
The AD's have a primary focus for the topics of their areas, but their
secondary focus needs to be on the IETF standards process. Having a 2 year AD
who can spend some additional time maybe helping the IESG with the workload of
the standards process would not be a bad idea.
Mike