It does have standing; section 6.2 of RFC 2418 (BCP 25). They can be listed
on the charter page. But I agree it's little used.
Creating a culture of grooming secretaries to become WG chairs will
help, in my opinion, to deal with the chair supply problem and will
allow evaluation of possible chairs ahead of time, plus presuambly
increase the motivation of the secretary to perform above expectation.
Again, similar arrangements seem very common in the various technical
subgroupings of major societies (ACM Sigcomm, IEEE ComSoc technical
committees).
I suspect that one could even argue that there's a need for an area
secretary/manager (or two), with explicit process acceleration
responsibilities, rather than technical review.
I'm sure others will correct me here, but I believe that the IEEE 802.*
organizations have similar arrangements. A random example includes
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/19/
Henning
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