Subject: [Eligibility-discuss] Entities

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2020 03:56:04 -0700

Hi Toerless,

I copied this message to another mailing list.

At 12:13 PM 29-06-2020, Toerless Eckert wrote:
>[rant]
>
>The long time NOMCOM scheme we have, strongly punishes direct
>employment by single big entities over other forms of loyalty
>and ecosystem structures. I think this is a historic artefact
>and lazyness in thinking about better solution, and it does IMHO
>not well take into account the evolution we had in the IETF
>over the last 20 years or so.

There was a thread at 
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-nomcom/moyE3aKW812hfMwYJW7KrtJ_UEw/ 
about the influence of a one entity.  There are other levels (the 
word may not be correct) to NomCom.  For example, the IAB approves 
IESG nominations and can exercise a veto on that.

>How about all those one or two people (consulting) companies that
>all have loyalty to a single undisclosed larger employer, like various
>agencies of a single government ? AFAIK we do not ask, but
>would we even consider different agencies of a single government
>to be a single entity wrt. NOMCOM ? I don't think we have
>done so when it comes to direct employment by them.

That is a variation of the same problem, i.e. influence of one 
entity.  It is possible for one entity, e.g. a government, to 
contract out to several other entities and you (used in general 
terms) end up with the same problem.

>Not to speak of individuals who have a lot more loyalty to
>the IETF purely from the self serving perspective that their
>career in IETF may be longer than that in any individual employer
>and behave accordingly. Wait. are we not all well advised to
>all behave like that ? But we're obviously not trusted to do so
>when working for a large employer.

Ok.

>How about many small companies whose loyalties lie with the
>specific business models such as those of OTTs/cloud-based ?

I don't know the answer to the above.

>How about the most likely subconcious "i have no idea on most
>IETF area candidates, but in doubt i will vote for someone with
>my own country/geo-area or cultural background" ?

I would not be surprised if that happened.

>Why are big vendors the only aspect we try to protect NOMCOM
>against ?

I'll leave the question to the persons who wrote the rules.

>Of course, i do not expect anything to improve, but at least
>we could be more open about the fact how the NOMCOM scheme
>is traditionally discriminatory in this respect. Because i don't
>think people would even agree with this classiciation (discrimination).

Those discussions were usually shut down or designed to fail.

>Having worked for 20 years for big vendors, i at least feld
>this rule to be discrimination after having served once in
>Nomcom and came out of it thinking that my specific vendor
>association had no impact on my Nomcom choices. Sure, i can be
>lying to myself. Who knows.

Ok.

>Of course, i do favour for IAB and all IETF areas those candidates
>who do not think the Internet infrastructure can be ignored
>or commoditized because it just needs to macially come out
>a wifi thingy into a notebook or cloud server and one just needs
>to build applications on top of it.

Ok.

>And exactly that candidate selection bias would likely be most
>dominant in those nomcom candidates to which the discrimination
>rule is applied, and if one wonders why the Internet infrastructure
>standards evolution is (at least IMHO) so ossified where as the
>applications running on top of it are not, then one has to wonder.

A few days ago, I came across a paper about governance.  It provided 
an interesting perspectives of why some standards are not implemented.

>Even if we cannot figure out how to improve the actual process,
>it would be fairer to the IETF members working for large
>employers if the Nomcom procedures would more explicitly
>highlight the discrimination introduced to acknowledge this
>unfairness. And write something like
>
>"we don't know how to do better, but if you have an
>  idea, please bring it forward".

Selection procedures are generally specified so that they are clear 
to everyone.  I did not bother to work on anything above Section 7 of 
the rules as it would require the tacit approval of the IESG and a 
significant investment of my time.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy