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
ajs(_at_)shinkuro(_dot_)com
Shinkuro, Inc.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf