On Sep 17, 2014, at 8:18 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker
<phill(_at_)hallambaker(_dot_)com> wrote:
Oh just increase the size of the NomCon and the issues go away.
I suggest expanding it to 100 members.
So, spend 10 times as many cycles on making the same decision? Would CFRG
consider a curve that was 10 times slower than the ones they are considering
right now?
We can barely get enough NomCom candidates right now. If volunteering all but
guarantees that you’re going to have to spend half of the November meeting
talking to people about other people, I don’t think we’d get as many volunteers
as we do.
At the moment the process is reasonably effective in avoiding really
bad appointments. But it is also pretty good at excluding
troublemakers and wildcards. And you need those sort of people every
so often to shake things up. Being selected by ten people whose names
were picked out of a hat guarantees that no AD, IAB or IETF chair can
ever claim a mandate to change anything in the organization.
Some ADs make trouble anyway, but the biggest thing affecting the choice of AD
is that they have to be funded by somebody else to work full time at the IETF.
If we had the IETF two hundred years ago, we might get gentlemen (in the old
sense of the word). Since these days the idle rich prefer to work in charity
rather than in managing standards organizations, we get people with funding
from corporations, government agencies, and the occasional academic, and the
people who decide to fund them don’t hire wildcards for the job.
That won't change even if we forgo the NomCom entirely and select ADs by a true
test of merit such as a bridge tournament or memorizing the most episodes of
Star Trek.
Yoav