OPEN ISSUE: WG Chair Selection (in general)

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Fri May 23 19:29:52 CEST 2003



--On 20. mai 2003 07:05 -0500 Spencer Dawkins <spencer at mcsr-labs.org> wrote:

> I found Harald's process for choosing co-chairs for the
> Problem Statement working group to be encouraging,
> and would like to see something like this become
> more common in the IETF.
>
> Subject to the "ADs and WG chairs must have a
> good relationship" caveat that Margaret mentioned...

I liked that process, because it gave me candidates I wouldn't have thought 
of, and gave me the opportunity to solicit input on them in a far more open 
fashion than I could have done otherwise. It was also special, in that I 
was looking for people capable of operating with much less direct 
involvement than the usual AD-Chair relationship, so having independent 
views of their qualifications was even more important to me than usual. And 
it did not require any change to the rules to allow me to do it.....

One thing I'm afraid of, though, is the degree to which the WG chair 
selection can be a tool of "corporate gameplaying".
When an AD is the sole judge of which candidate is best for a position, 
he/she can (and has been!) accused of picking the person based on personal 
or company bias; this is hard to defend against, and the accusation, if 
made, can be quite harmful to the cooperation climate of a working group - 
one risks the AD going into "reverse discrimination mode" and seeking 
candidates that are obviously unaffiliated, even if they are not the best 
people available.

Making a public call for input can mean getting more input - but also makes 
it easier to make objective-sounding complaints: "My company has offered 
seven chair candidates and had none selected - are you discriminating us?", 
"since company A got WG X, and company B got WG Y, we should get WG Z, even 
though our chair candidate is less qualified than company A's".

And in the end, I still think the AD will be stuck with making the decision.

Thoughts?

                      Harald





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