Let me suggest that instead of delegating the IAB chair responsibilities we,
instead, change the ex-officio status that the various chairs currently have
to observer status, change the organizational appointees to permit
(require?) appointment from their appointing organizations, and also add
two or three additional permanent members to the IAOC, those members to be
selected in alternate years by the Nomcom.
First, I think it would be entirely reasonable to add two voting
members to the IAOC for a couple of reasons:
1. Temporary absences will be less disruptive. I'm not sure how much
of an issue that has actually been on the IAOC, though, so I don't
know how important this is.
2. Adding two NomCom-selected voting members would increase the pool
of potential IAOC chairs to seven (from five). Making sure there's
someone on the IAOC who is eligible to chair, willing to chair, and
capable of chairing is sometimes a difficult issue now.
Now, a variant here:
In addition to that, the IESG has chatted in the past about ceding its
appointment to the NomCom, and there was significant support in the
IESG for such a move (which, yes, would require updating RFC 4071).
Our thought in the discussion was twofold:
1. RFC 4071 explicitly says that we are not appointing an IAOC member
to represent the IESG in any way: we're making the appointment, and
the IAB is making theirs, but once the appointments are made those
members act in the same way as the NomCom-appointed ones.
2. The idea that the IESG should have its own appointment because it
will look at the candidates differently and will pick with different
criteria than the NomCom would is valid in theory, but has little or
no applicability in practice. In many ways, it would be better to let
the NomCom balance its choices while selecting two (or even three)
IAOC members at the same time.
There could be one difficulty: If we were to move both the IESG and
IAB appointments to the NomCom *and* add two new NomCom appointments,
the NomComs would be selecting three IAOC members each year. Finding
suitable candidates would be a challenge. A big one. On the other
hand, the IESG's list of candidates usually includes the incumbent and
the volunteers that the NomCom didn't select, so, again, there isn't a
real change there in practice.
Barry