I think delegation to directorates, chairs, and document shepherds is more
useful than creating a new assistant role. Not saying that such delegation is
easy, but it clearly has worked well in some situations at least.
There's really just a couple of fundamental variables we can tweak: delegation
(moving work around), depth (how much and how detailed we do it), coordination
(how different pieces of work are organised as either separate independent
processes or as something that needs more coordination), and scope (what work
belongs in the IETF). And in every organisation, the roles needs to be
reasonable & motivated for everyone in those roles.
In my completely person opinion: First, tweaking the scope should be off the
table, because organisation should follow need, rather than vice versa. Our job
(at the IESG/IETF) to fix the organisation if necessary. Second, I think we
should look at delegation and depth of work at the IESG, and not merely because
it would help AD work load. The better reason to look at that would be to
empower the WGs to do their work in as complete fashion as possible, and be
self responsible for dealing with the issues that arise, e.g., in cross-area
reviews. This is why we've said that we will be sending more work back to the
WGs and created the early directorate review experiment. Admittedly these are
small steps. But it is my belief at least that the IESG needs to get out of the
loop in more cases than we are today.
Finally, a couple of +1s to the following people:
Loa wrote:
I should probably keep my mouth shat about this :) ! Looking tot he RTG
area don't we have an Assistant AD, only that we call it the
RTG Directorate Chair? A very proper place to delegate work and assign
responsibility.
Indeed. (Which may beg the question of whether additional recognition for the
important work by chairs and directorate folk needs more recognition.)
And Joel:
For better or worse I told the nomcom that I only have 2 hours a day (7 days
a week) for this… They took me anyway. The load is unevenly distributed. The
internet and routing and Apps ADs appear to have more drafts to process and
more complex working group interactions, then does the ops side of ops and
management.
That said, this is not a not a full time job for me and I am not compensated
for doing it. If my level of available commitment isn't adequate, I guess
we'll find out between now and the 2 year mark. My contribution to the
things that bring me to the IETF as on operator have dropped off because I
don't have time for them.
Kudos to Joel for doing such a good job with a limited amount of time. I hope
that this sets an example as well for others to follow! (Obviously, areas and
situations differ, too, which people should take into account.)
Jari