OPEN ISSUE: WG Chair Selection (in general)

[Bob Hinden]

Harald,

>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.

Part of protecting against perceptions of company bias is to make sure that 
company affiliations are public.  I noticed that we no longer list company 
affiliations on the IESG and IAB member pages.  This makes it hard to tell 
some of the IAB and IESG members company affiliation.  For example looking 
at the email address of the IESG and IAB, one might conclude that we have 
people affiliated with:

2       ATT
1       Cisco
1       Docomo
1       Hactrn
1       Hotmail
2       IBM
1       ICIR
1       IETF
1       IIJ
1       Lucent
1       Mindspring
1       Mrochek
1       Neustar
3       PSG
1       Qualcomm
1       RTFM
1       Sun
1       Telstra
1       Thinkingcat
1       UCL
1       Vigilsec

But doing some research (RFCs, IDs, google, etc.) the following list is 
generated:

1       Alcatel
2       ATT
2       Cisco
1       Docomo
1       Hactrn
2       IBM
1       ICIR
2       IIJ
2       Lucent
1       Microsoft
1       Mindspring
1       Mrochek
1       Neustar
1       Qualcomm
1       RTFM
1       Sun
1       Telstra
1       Thinkingcat
1       UCL
1       Vigil Security

A bit different.  I think it is important to always show the company 
affiliations of IAB, IESG, Nomcom, working group chairs, and document 
authors.  Having this information be hidden or murkey can give the 
appearance of "corporate game playing" too.  Much better if everything be 
in the open and transparent.

Bob