John,
I would add one, which is the consequence of your "known enough
to the AD..." observation. There is a completely natural
tendency, whether it causes this problem or others, for the ADs
to keep going back to the same well of people who have known
abilities, especially abilities to handle this sort of
situation. To the extent to which that happens, it suggests
three meta-issues:
(i) We aren't doing enough to develop leadership and spread the
responsibilities around. In many cases, if all of those
criteria cannot be met, it would be far better to drop the
"known enough to the AD" and/or "knows enough about the IETF
process" criteria requirements and focus on the others plus an
apparent willingness to learn, then add in someone who meets
those requirements but whose role is advise and mentor the
Chair(s) --and do so with some authority and a close
relationship with the AD-- than to focus on those criteria.
(ii) We need to encourage more interactions between sitting ADs
and those who are not already WG Chairs, IESG members, or IAB
members. The current patterns of ADs tending to spend all of an
IETF week together, with WG Chairs, and monitoring WGs are not
conducive to ADs getting to know people who are not already part
of the leadership structure well enough to meet that criterion.
(iii) Without getting into whether the problem of overlong AD
tenures has been fixed or whether the shorter terms today are
just a temporary aberration, very long tenures on the IESG,
rather than having people regularly return to the trenches and
get first-hand experience, also, IMO, tends to aggravate the
problem of the AD not knowing a wide enough range of possible WG
Chair candidates
All excellent points. I would add that the process should
start from the potential new chair "resource" at least being
(a) known to IETF management so that he can even be
considered and (b) the resource getting experience in IETF
work.
I recall Brian's list of desirable chair characteristics.
I recall that we have had threads about how successful
our review attempts have been. We all called for cross-area
review and high expertise*. I know that when I appoint
editors or secretaries as a chair I go for the best persons
I can find -- even if they are already doing a lot**.
Looks like we are always going to the same pool. No
wonder our re-org and review team attempts sometimes
fail. Those people are already doing all they can. Creating
new forums for them will not increase the amount of time
in a day.
We need to start recruiting new people. There's been
excellent work recently in the training side -- but we also
need to pick those people as editors, secretaries, co-chairs
of a more experienced chair, pick random WG members as
reviewers etc. Of course we are already doing it, but we
need to do more of it. Otherwise the pool does not increase.
--Jari
*) One review team attempt failed after only one review
had been performed, by a know IETF person who is already
120% occupied with reviews anyway. What did the team
accomplish?
**) The most active IETF persons can have as many as ~50
drafts.
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