Attracting volunteers for leadership roles (Was: Re: Substantial nomcom

Doug,

First and most important: Mary kindly provided information. Please do not 
assume that she has opinions that she did not express.

Then back to the substantial topic: Many of us have understanding of a number 
of other organisations, and what kinds of differences they have to IETF. 
Including the fundamental mode of the operation, compensation structures, 
financing, and so on.

The IETF, along with many other successful standards organisations, is based on 
voluntary adoption of our standards. When we make good, timely standards that 
people care about, there will be participants that want to observe, contribute, 
and even manage the production of these standards. If we do not, they do not. 
As simple as that. Personal opinion is that we’ve succeeded in doing things 
that interest the industry in the last few years, but that is something that we 
need to repeat every month going forward as well. And there is room for 
improvement. And it still is a big challenge to recruit leadership, nomcom 
members, etc. We should be grateful for the excellent teams we have...

And we should be aware of the implications of different modes of operation. If 
you run an organisation where people have to care a lot in order to 
participate, the good thing is that you’ll create a forcing function to work on 
useful things. The bad side of that is that it may create too much focus on 
things that are in commercial world only. And as Stewart noted, lean 
corporations may focus only on products, not on other things as much. The 
situations are different in other modes. For instance, in paid board model you 
might encounter situations where the organisation starts to be self-selecting, 
or you would get different people applying than you would otherwise. Which 
might of course be good or bad. In any case, it is not immediately clear to me 
that even if we had a bigger funding source, paying our board members would 
immediately solve all our issues. Many of our participants are not limited 
through getting food for the family, but rather through opportunity costs of 
using them either for IETF work or for creating some new products in their 
companies.

Anyway, what are your experiences and suggestions in this topic, Doug? Do you 
have suggested models to follow?

Jari

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