Henning and Spencer,
first of all I think Henning's idea is a nice one. I think that there
should be some kind of a way to both get rid of chairs that are in the
way of progress in a humane manner and they do not understand it
themselves. However, I think (or at least hope) these kind of people are
in the minority.
I think also there should be some check points where chairs that feel
that they do not have the time or interest to devote to their WG anymore
could jump safely out without loosing face or having a feeling that they
let the WG down. If there would be a natural way to do this and possibly
a natural candidate (the WG secretary) maybe people would do it more
often.
Cheers,
Jonne.
On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 16:24, ext Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
Spencer Dawkins wrote:
- working group chair selection
- working group chair term limits
- working group chair accountability
all of which matter, and all of which could probably be improved.
My thoughts are:
- if we were asking for (periodic re-)commitments from working group
chairs, would we still be asking for term limits?
I doubt it if it is a more formality.
- we are all also aware of people in leadership roles who continue to
commit and continue to miss commitments. How long does it actually take
to figure out that a WG chair "can no longer dedicate the necessary time?"
There are, I believe, two answers to that:
(1) It's too difficult and conflict-inducing to try to evaluate this for
each WG, so a term limit acts as a safety mechanism, limiting the damage
and allowing a face-saving retreat.
(2) I supect most of us know which WGs are well-run and which just kind
of exist, with brief spurts of activity, so asking the members might be
one step. If we were serious about meeting deadlines, we could have
measurable metrics of achievement (see previous message).
- every working group is different, and every {1,2,3} set of of WG
chairs is different. We can give guidance on WG chair selection, but
hard boundaries are probably harder - it's easy to say "at least one WG
chair must be experienced", but how much experience is enough, etc. It
does not help that some of the goals are conflicting (developing new
chairs vs. chair continuity). Would a BCP on WG chair selection (and
reselection, if we thought of WG chair services as terms) be helpful, or
just process silliness?
Based on personal experience, the problem has not been with the
selection of WG chairs initially in most cases. Since many WG chairs, by
definition, do this for the first time, it is very difficult to predict
how well they do in that role. Personally, I wouldn't appoint somebody
unless they have non-IETF project management or other significant
second-level management experience, but I'm not sure you would want to
institute that as a rule.
The problem is that perfectly nice and technically capable people
- lose interest
- change companies
- get promoted
- underestimate time required (or overestimate time available)
- underestimate the tedium of dealing with administrivia and keeping
dozens of projects (drafts) inching along
- underestimate the non-technical skills required to do the job
All of these are hard to predict ahead of time. I'd much rather give
more people a chance to prove themselves, but with the expectation that
the chance is either strictly time-limited and/or performance-monitored.
I think that's a more open way to run an organization rather than trying
to establish criteria for taking on a position (and hoping that these
are predictive of success).
Two related problems here, as you pointed out in another posting - when
the WG is only active for six weeks per year, and when the WG chair is
only active for nine weeks per year. I don't see how we can focus on
this with our current milestone tracking ("no, really, we'll finish that
draft by the NEXT meeting, this time for sure"), so your comments in the
"front-end delays" thread apply here as well.
I think we agree that performance-tracking would make these "seasonal"
WGs more obvious to the community and the AD management.
It is irritating that our process explicitly allows for WG secretaries,
but almost no WGs use them. Perhaps if people contacted WG chairs and
volunteered, instead of waiting for WG chairs to wake up and stop trying
to take their own minutes, etc?
This is an incentive thing: Currently, besides the goodness of one's
heart, there is no real incentive to do this. Other volunteer
organizations have expected chains of succession, i.e., a technical
committee secretary/vice chair/treasurer has a good shot at the corner
office job. This only works if the marquee jobs are time-limited.
Henning
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Jonne Soininen
Nokia
Tel: +358 40 527 46 34
E-mail: jonne(_dot_)soininen(_at_)nokia(_dot_)com
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