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Re: IETF Diversity Question on Berlin Registration?

2013-04-29 18:51:58
Mike:
Actually, I don't think this is even a mostly correct statement -
that AD select chairs.

Dave:
It is a long-standing, simple, objective, unvarying management fact of
IETF procedure:  ADs hire and fire wg chairs.

Mike:
The AD's do have the final say.  No question.  But  "select" implies
that the own the entire process of creating and staffing a WG. Nope.

Dave:
They do "own" it; that's a formal truth.

That they often delegate details and concur with self-organizing choices
means nothing, in terms of their authority.

Dan:
But it might mean something in terms of the discussion at hand. If the
ADs are concurring with self-organizing choices as opposed to selecting
WG chairs, then they aren't really imposing a "looks like me" bias into
the selection process.

OK, here: I have to step in now.
Let me look at the new working group chairs and BoF chairs in the App
Area (as that's my area) since I've been an AD (one year, so far).

Chair changes:
APPSAWG: added Murray Kucherawy and Salvatore Loreto
CORE: added Andrew McGregor
IRI: added Peter Saint-Andre

New working groups
WEIRDS: Olaf Kolkman and Murray Kucherawy
SCIM: Morteza Ansari and Leif Johansson
SPFBIS: SM and Andrew Sullivan
IMAPMOVE: Ned Freed and Alexey Melnikov
JCARDCAL: Bert Greevenbosch and Peter Saint-Andre
QRESYNC: Dave Cridland and Eliot Lear

BoFs at IETF 83:
SCIM: Eliot Lear and Steve Bellovin
WEIRDS: Andrew Sullivan

BoFs at IETF 84:
DSII: Beth Pale and Ted Hardie

BoFs at IETF 86:
AGGSRV: Peter Saint-Andre
JSON: Joe Hildebrand

In all but one of these cases, we (the ADs) contacted people and
*asked* them to chair.  The exception was DSII and Beth Pale, but this
was not a working-group-forming BoF (and Ted was the one we
solicited).  For the SCIM working group, Morteza was one of the
proponents of the IETF 83 BoF, but he did not ask to be chair, and *I
asked him* only after consulting with folks and getting opinions that
suggested that he would be a good choice.  That has generally been my
approach and Pete's to finding chairs: getting opinions other than our
own.

We have a couple of other new chartering efforts in process, and we'll
be handling those similarly: selecting people we think will be
appropriate to chair those working groups.

Of course, if someone comes to us and says that they'd like to chair a
working group, we will take that into consideration.  But we most
certainly do NOT simply appoint people because they're technology
proponents, nor because they ask us to.  My sense of the rest of the
IESG is that they behave similarly.

I can tell you unequivocally that the ADs appoint the chairs, and "own
the entire process of [...] staffing a WG".  We are not just taking
the people who come to us and saying, "Yeah, sure, you'll do."  We
also want to find new chairs -- in the working-group chairs list
above, Andrew, Morteza, SM, Bert, and Dave are all first-time chairs.

Pete and I are also actively looking to increase the diversity in App
Area chairs -- perhaps you'll notice that we have *no* female chairs
in the App Area, at least partly because we have no women who are
active in the App Area just now.  We're working on that (and on other
diversity aspects) -- see, for example, the first item here:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/85/slides/slides-85-apparea-0.pdf

We're always eager for suggestions for people to be on our list of
potential chairs; please send such to 
<app-ads(_at_)tools(_dot_)ietf(_dot_)org>.  And,
yes, we *do* own the staffing process.

Barry, Applications AD

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