--On Tuesday, June 25, 2013 07:25 +0000 "Eggert, Lars"
<lars(_at_)netapp(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Jun 25, 2013, at 7:53, Randy Bush <randy(_at_)psg(_dot_)com> wrote:
Congratulations, gentlemen.
and they are all male
Well, all the volunteers were male, so no real surprise here.
(And yes, I wish the volunteer pool had been more diverse. But
it wasn't.)
I haven't looked at the volunteer pool, but all of the new
appointees are also North American or European.
Lars,
As an outgoing member of the RSOC, it would be inappropriate for
me to comment here on the new membership, but I think your
comment summarizes a critical issue in the ongoing diversity
discussion. Personally, I think there are lessons to be learned
for the future... and I wonder how many more times the community
needs to discuss them before they are considered normal
practice. In particular...
Arturo and Peter,
There is at least an outline of a job description. It appears
in Section 3.1.1 of RFC 6635 and includes:
"The IAB will designate the membership of the RSOC with
the following goals: preserving effective stability;
keeping it small enough to be effective, and keeping it
large enough to provide general Internet community
expertise, specific IETF expertise, publication
expertise, and stream expertise. Members [...] are
expected to bring a balance between short- and
long-term perspectives."
One can sensibly argue that the above description, possibly
accompanied by comments from the IAB and/or current RSOC
members, should have been in the announcement but not that it
was somehow missing or secret. My personal view is that more
explicitness about the description would have made little or no
difference in the applicant pool as long as the announcement
itself was made exclusively within IETF community mailing lists.
More broadly, anyone in the community with real interest in the
topics that the RSOC addresses would presumably have followed at
least some of the contents of RFC 6635, 4844, and related
documents; the rfc-interest list; a few recent BOFs or their
minutes; RFC Editor reports in plenaries; etc. While I have no
idea what the IAB did, if I were still on the IAB I certainly
would have tried to determine what an applicant already knew
about the work of the RSOC and the RFC Series and dropped anyone
from within the community who wasn't moderately well-informed
from consideration. It would be easy to deduce From those
sources that the RFC Series (and hence the RSOC) face major
policy and strategic challenges with authors whose technical
English writing skills are not up to a professional standard for
quality, with internationalization of the documents, with
preserving the properties of the RFC Series as an archival
collection, with document production and the relationship
between generic and format markup, with increased credibility of
the Series for academic publication and reference, and so on.
Presumably the RSOC, as a group, should have sufficient
expertise to be able to oversee investigations and decisions in
those areas although RFC 6635 leaves it up to the IAB to
determine how important that expertise is relative to other
considerations.
However, the more general issue is that the description above
calls for a wide range of expertise, not all of which need to
come from the same person or subset of people. While recruiting
candidate IESG members from outside the IETF community would be,
IMO, pretty silly, that constraint doesn't apply to the RSOC
(give the description above and actual experience). It would
have been, at least IMO, reasonable for the IAB to try to
recruit potential RSOC members from broader communities,
communities in which some of that expertise would be more
broadly available than it is among "normal" IETF participants or
the subset of us that carefully track IETF-announce or are
active on this list. As people have commented in other
contexts, if one cares, in practice, about diversity then part
of the solution to issues of underrepresentation is broadening
the applicant pool to include additional populations.
Now, the IAB, in its wisdom, chose to not engage in such a
broader recruiting effort. I have no idea whether they
considered and discussed that option.
If the community thinks that diversity is really important
enough, then the various appointing bodies (including the
Nomcom) should to told to consider --and maybe even report back
on-- whether particular positions justify a broader search
because posting announcements to IETF lists may not inform the
best range of potential candidates. If the community believes
that diversity is important and that members of appointing
bodies aren't taking it seriously enough, that should be made
clear to the Nomcom (remembering that the Nomcom has the right
to recruit rather than waiting passively for nominations and the
right --and maybe the obligation-- to inquire, when considering
incumbents, about why particular decisions were made and what
positions individuals took on them).
In the case of bodies like the RSOC, if the community believes
that the body is important (I do, but I'm biased) and that
effectiveness is likely to be significantly diminished by lack
of diversity in gender, expertise, and/or geography (I'm not
completely convinced, but YMMD), remember that 6635 gives the
IAB the power to increase the RSOC's size (or otherwise change
its composition) at any time, balancing "small enough to be
effective" against other perceived needs. I presume the IAB
would listen to community input on that sort of subject. If
they would not, the problems run much deeper than appointments
to the RSOC.
Or we can keep whining each time appointments are made that
don't include a sufficient number of women, residents above the
Arctic Circle or below the Antarctic one, or other groups that
are perceived as underrepresented. The problem with whining (or
wishing that things were different), no matter how
well-intentioned and justified, is that it doesn't lead directly
to changes that are actionable and for which the members of the
appointing bodies can be held accountable.
best,
john