Subject: [Eligibility-discuss] Do we still care?

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:36:16 -0400

Hi.

Noting my question on the manycouches list about the
relationship between this work, that effort, and SHMOO, I
decided to take a look at where this effort left off. I found
notes in March, and even in October, that we really needed to
get the longer-term eligibility questions under control before
IETF 108 rather than risk having a situation in which more
emergency "one time only" decisions are made, using ad hoc
processes, in the last quarter of the year.

IETF 108 is fast approaching, there is no slot for eligibility
discussions on the preliminary agenda (I'm not saying there
should be, only noting that there isn't), and the last posting
to this list was on April 23, more than two months ago.

Do we have a plan?

   john

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 16:58:05 +1200

John,

At least there is a plan to update draft-carpenter-eligibility-expand
and bring it to gendispatch again. This has been stalled waiting for
more data analysis, which just happened in the last 24 hours. I will gladly
accept more comments on the -02 draft for the next couple of days.

(The data analysis isn't secret, it just didn't get posted yet.)

Regards
   Brian

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:46:56 -0400

Brian,

I will try to make another pass through
draft-carpenter-eligibility-expand-02 over the weekend to see if
I have anything to add and just had a look at the posted March
numbers [1]

While I know we are all happier with quantitative date in our
hands, I have to confess some skepticism about the value of this
exercise.  First, we know that, in the past, there have always
been many more people who are eligible than who volunteer for
the NomCom candidate pool.   One can speculate on many reasons
why a higher percentage of people don't volunteer, including the
time commitment involved and the possibility of wanting to be a
candidate for some position, but the reality is that we don't
know (and, for a variety of reasons I'll skip over for now,
surveys would not tell us either).  Another thing we know from
observation [2] is that recent Nomcoms (and, given the
randomization, the volunteer pool) falls a little short along
many measures of breadth of educated and informed perspectives,
especially when the range of those who should be actively
contributing to the IETF are considered [3].  Now, having more
online-only meetings or, probably more important, being able to
participate in the Nomcom entirely remotely, might change the
proportion of people who do not volunteer because of the time
requirements.  However, I don't see any way to estimate,
long-term, whether those requirements will decrease (less need
to go to meetings) or increase (maybe having Nomcom members work
mostly or entirely remotely from each other and candidates will
lower efficiency and increase the time commitment).  For the
next Nomcom or two, people will just need to speculate about the
commitment they are signing up for and it is impossible to guess
whether the speculation will increase the portion of eligible
(by any criterion) people who volunteer or decrease it.  

I don't see a  major change in the number of eligible people who
are unwilling to volunteer because they might be candidates for
Nomcom-appointed positions as likely but, if the ferment of the
last months leaves people either more inclined to enter the
leadership because they thing they can do better or less likely
because they are discouraged about the IETF, I could be wrong
about that [4].

Picking up from another discussion on the list, there are
obvious ways for either a hostile entity or a company that wants
to improve its representation in "the leadership" to game the
current system.  We can observe that some companies have a
higher proportion of volunteers than others [5], and probably
quantify that.  But, absent reliable testimony from
whistleblowers, we might be able to guess at motivations.  But
we cannot safely and accurately distinguish between a
public-spirited commitment to the IETF and the Internet and
power games of one sort or another (even with companies who are
believed to offer incentives to people getting Nomcom or
leadership positions).  Similarly, one might wonder about trying
to beat the limit on people from one company  on the Nomcom by
having people list subsidiaries or closely affiliated companies,
but it would take far more complex rules -- ones that would be
difficult to interpret and enforce-- than we have to
differentiate between the preferences of participants and their
organizations from malicious attacks.  So, is it worthwhile to
be concerned about gaming and attacks?  Probably.   Is it
worthwhile getting sidetracked or blocked by those concerns
absent evidence that they would create greater problems than we
have had in the past (not just more opportunities for attacks in
an already opportunity-rich environment)?  Possibly not a lot.

Ultimately, whatever we decide will be a bit of an experiment.
There is a case to be made that, long before this year, the
current Nomcom eligibility rules and the recent Nomcom working
model, have not worked out well, in both cases mostly for
reasons that were not anticipated in 1995.    We have not
concluded that the issues are serious enough to justify and
implement significant changes [6].  While we should try to avoid
making things a lot worse, we should also understand that we may
not get things right and try to be sure that, should significant
problems occur, we have adequate mechanisms for making
adjustments.   Otherwise, to do anything, we first need to go in
search of crystal balls, animal entrails, yarrow stalks, or
other reliable means of predicting the future and interactions
between it and possible decisions... a task that is only
slightly more difficult than finding quantitative measurements
that actually give us good and useful information in contexts
where so much that is important is unknown.

best,
   john

[1] https://github.com/sftcd/elig/blob/master/queries.md

[2] The parts of this that can be measured quantitatively are
crude surrogates and questionable ones. 

[3] They probably also fall short on representation of people
who are ignorant about many relevant subjects but who have
strong opinions about them, but we probably don't want to fix
that if we can avoid it.  

[4] There are three other sets of figures that are not on the
list that might be interesting.  When the Nomcom model was
created, each Nomcom was expected to appoint about half of the
IESG and half of the IAB, each about a dozen members in size.
Since then, the IESG has increased in size (more Areas with more
than one AD) and we have added many more Nomcom-appointed
positions with diverse qualifications. Obviously, that change
has increased the Nomcom workload.  But has it changed the
proportion of those eligible who volunteer for the Nomcom?
Also, by most measures (qualitative as well as quantitative),
the IETF has gotten bigger since the mid-1990s.  Counting
non-attendee contributors (however ever one might estimate that)
as well as meeting attendees, has the proportion of eligible
people who volunteer for the Nomcom remained constant or changed
in some systematic way?  That those sorts of numbers are
interesting does not mean they would be useful or constructively
actionable, but they do illustrate the nature of the rat hole
I'm concerned about our going down.

[5] Comparing their number of Nomcom volunteers to their number
of attendees doesn't help much either, again because one cannot
distinguish from quantitative measurements between public spirit
and obligation and conspiracy.

[6] There may be a whole different discussion about why the IETF
has been unwilling to unable to engage with those issues and
make appropriate changes, but I hope we can safely skip it,
rather than considering it critical, for this effort.

--On Saturday, June 27, 2020 16:58 +1200 Brian E Carpenter
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> John,
> 
> At least there is a plan to update
> draft-carpenter-eligibility-expand and bring it to gendispatch
> again. This has been stalled waiting for more data analysis,
> which just happened in the last 24 hours. I will gladly accept
> more comments on the -02 draft for the next couple of days.
>

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 18:55:20 +0100

Hiya,

On 27/06/2020 05:58, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> This has been stalled 

To be clear: that was my fault - I got diverted onto
a time-consuming thing.

Cheers,
S.