Subject: SECOND CALL: IESG Transport Area Director Call for Nominees

From: Ralph Droms <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 08:02:41 -0500

Second call for nominations
---------------------------

The NomCom has been asked to fill the Transport Area Director position
now vacant as a result of Jon Peterson's nomination to Real-time
Applications and Infrastructure Area Director and resignation from his
position as Transport Area Director.  Therefore, the NomCom is now
accepting nominations for Transport Area Director, to fill the
remaining one year of the term of the vacant Transport AD position.
Nominations will close at 1700EST on Friday, March 3.

The requirements for the Transport Area Director position are included
below.  Please send nominations, including the nominee's name, e-mail
address and telephone number (if available) to [email-masked].

- Ralph Droms
  Chair, NomCom 2005-2006

-----
Transport Area:

The technical areas covered by the Transport area are those with data
transport goals or with transport design issues and impact on
congestion in Internet. To illustrate the latter: the Pseudowire
Emulation Edge to Edge working group (PWE3) was initially in Transport
until the architecture was developed, and then moved to the Internet
area. The major topics in Transport are protocols (TCP, UDP, SCTP,
DCCP), congestion control, multicast transports, QOS and reservation
signaling, performance metrics, NAT regularization, NFS, and Internet
storage. Transport is considering future work in generalized forward
error correction, overlay multicast, very high bandwidth traffic, and
peer to peer protocol transport.

A Transport AD should have a good understanding of congestion control,
flow control, real-time transport protocols and other transport-level
issues that affect application layer protocols. These basic transport
skills should also be augmented by strong interest and skills in such
issues as NAT and identity.

The Transport area intersects most frequently with Internet Area, the
Applications Area, the RAI Area, and the Security Area. So, cross-area
expertise in any of those areas would be particularly useful.

The Transport area has a strong management tradition. Although the
technical areas are many, a Transport Area Director should have not
just technical skills but also strong management and communication
skills.  Two of the critical skills that the Area values especially:

o Guiding working groups to follow their charters closely
o Nurturing new talent for the area's leadership

Generic Requirements:

IESG members are the managers of the IETF standards process. This
means that they must understand the way the IETF works, be good at
working with other people, be able to inspire and encourage other
people to work together on a volunteer basis, and have sound technical
judgment about IETF technology and its relationship to technology
developed elsewhere.

ADs select and directly manage the WG chairs, so IESG members should
possess sufficient interpersonal and management skills to manage
~15-30 part-time people. Most ADs are also responsible for one or more
directorates or review teams. So the ability to identify good leaders
and technical experts and recruit them for IETF work is
required. Having been a WG chair helps in understanding the WG chair
role, and will help in resolving problems and issues that a WG chair
may have.

In addition, all IESG members should have strong technical expertise
that crosses two or three IETF areas. Ideally, an IESG member would
have made significant technical contributions in more than one IETF
area, preferably authoring documents and/or chairing WGs in more than
one area.

IESG members are expected to make sure that every document coming
before the IESG is properly reviewed. Although IESG members may
delegate the actual review to individuals or review teams, the IESG
members will need to understand and represent the reviewers'
objections or comments. So the ability and willingness to read and
understand complex information quickly is another important attribute
in an IESG member. (Note that this does not mean that every AD must
review every draft personally - but they must be satisfied that
adequate review has taken place.)

It is helpful for an IESG member to have a good working knowledge of
the IETF document process and WG creation and chartering process.
This knowledge is most likely to be found in experienced IETF WG
chairs, but may also be found in authors of multiple documents.

IESG members must also have strong verbal and written communications
skills and a proven track record of leading and contributing to the
consensus of diverse groups.

A few comments on the IESG role:

Serving on the IESG requires a substantial time commitment. The basic
IESG activities consume between 25 and 40 hours per week (varying by
area and by month, with the most time required immediately before IETF
meetings). Most IESG members also participate in additional IETF
leadership activities, further increasing the time commitment for
those individuals. Even if they do not occupy formal liaison
positions, ADs may also need to interact with external bodies such as
other standards organizations, which may require travel. It is also
imperative that IESG members attend all IETF meetings and up to two
additional IESG retreats per year.

Because of the large time and travel commitments, employer support for
a full two year stint is essential for an IESG member. Because of
personal impact including awkwardly timed conference calls, an IESG
member's family must also be supportive.

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