Subject: Re: [Manycouches] Murray Kucherawy's No Objection on charter-ietf-shmo-00-00: (with COMMENT)

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 15:13:18 -0400

(sorry sent earlier message without including the intended
footnote.  That note was intended to point out that Barbara's
clear statement that those selected to this year's NomCom would
be allowed to participate remotely even if f2f meetings resumed
during its term is, IMO, immensely helpful but, like RFC 8788 on
eligibility to be one of those members, does not address the
issue long-term. )

   john

--On Wednesday, June 24, 2020 11:10 -0400 Alissa Cooper
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> 
>> 
>> --On Thursday, June 18, 2020 11:50 -0400 Alissa Cooper
>> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> 
>>>> Since it's already come up once and resulted in an expedited
>>>> BCP being produced, I think this should be explicit -- one
>>>> way the other -- about whether discussions about NomCom
>>>> eligibility will be in scope for this working group.
>>> 
>>> I added this to the sentence about finances being out of
>>> scope:
>>> 
>>> "Aside from the fourth work item above, discussion of
>>> financial aspects of IETF meetings and changes to RFC 8713
>>> are both out of scope."
>>> 
>>> Does that help? 
>> 
>> Actually, Alissa, it raises an interesting question for me.  I
>> understand that SHMO will have a lot on its plate but I'm
>> guessing that the people who will want to participate actively
>> in it are more or less the same as those who have been
>> participating in manycouches (which, I assume, is why you
>> wanted the discussion on that list) and again more or less
>> the same as those who were active on eligibility-discuss,
>> which has had no traffic for some time.   
>> 
>> In part because I believe that lurching from one crisis
>> justifying emergency and extraordinary action to the next is
>> bad for the IETF, I wonder if it would make sense to
>> explicitly fold the eligibility-discuss topics into SHMO and
>> see if we can really lay a solid foundation for future
>> occasions in which all-online meetings are needed (or
>> wanted).  Again, I recognize SHMO's potentially-long topic
>> list.  I'd think merging the two would be a terrible idea if
>> we had a reasonable expectation that the two groups would be
>> disjoint enough to let them split up the work and proceed in
>> parallel.  But, if I'm right that it would be basically the
>> same people (notably including you, and I assume you are
>> stretched much too thin already) then nothing is gained by
>> keeping them separate and combining them would permit better
>> sequencing of the work and save redundant discussions.
> 
> I think there may be differences in the community of interest
> between these things, and while there is a mutual dependency
> on meeting cadence there are other aspects related to the
> eligibility discussion that don't have much to do with
> meeting cadence. So I think keeping them separate is helpful
> and I'm hoping we can make progress on
> draft-carpenter-eligibility-expand via gendispatch.

Alissa,

In part because I'm concerned that turning this into a long[er]
thread might impede progress on both efforts (and maybe some
others), I will defer to your judgment on the above.

However, my main concern is that anything we do preserves, and
ideally expands, the diversity of perspectives present in the
IETF, not only with regard to obvious and relatively easily
measured factors like geographical and gender identity but also
occupation (e.g., designers, developers, operators, and so on),
employment and support (large, medium, and companies and
self-funded individuals), career stages, amount of time they can
dedicate to the IETF in a given week or month, and so on.  We
should keep in mind, however, that perceptions of how the IETF
treats different people and groups can affect decisions about
whether and how to participate.  For example, if people perceive
that they are being made (or kept) as second-class citizens who
have little ability to directly influence IETF decision-making
or to be significant parts of the processes to select leaders
[1] or, in extreme cases, to protect themselves and the
community against actions that may disproportionately affect
them by appeals and potentially recall actions, that may lead to
decisions to be less involved or not involved at all.
Similarly, distributing related work among too many activities
and lists to make it possible for part-timers to keep up may
affect decisions to participate.

So, because all of these topics are your responsibility as
General Area AD, I would ask that you monitor them on an ongoing
basis for overlaps in participation and topics that interact or
are partially being discussed in multiple places.  Should that
occur, I trust you will take action to either more clearly
separate the work or to draw things together.

thanks for considering the suggestion.
   best,
    john