Additional Criteria for Nominating Committee Eligibility

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

According to [RFC8713], the IETF Nominating Committee is populated from a pool of volunteers with a specified record of attendance at IETF plenary face-to-face meetings. In view of the unexpected cancellation of the IETF 107 meeting, the risk of future cancellations, the probability of less frequent meetings in future in support of sustainability, and a general increase in remote participation, this document defines a process experiment [RFC3933] of fixed duration to use additional criteria to qualify volunteers.¶

Also according to [RFC8713], the qualification for signing a community petition for the recall of certain IETF office-holders is that same as for the Nominating Committee. This document does not change that, but see Section 7.¶

The source for this is at https://github.com/sftcd/elig/ and PRs are welcome there. Discussion on the eligibility-discuss@ietf.org list is also welcome.¶

2. Term of the Experiment

The cancellation of the in-person IETF 107 meeting, and the risk of IETF 108 also being cancelled, mean that the current criteria are in any case seriously perturbed for the next two years. The experiment therefore needs to start as soon as possible. However, the experiment does not apply to the selection of the 2020-2021 Nominating Committee.¶

The experiment will cover the two IETF Nominating Committee cycles starting in 2021 and 2022. As soon as the 2022-2023 Nominating Committee is seated, the IESG must consult the Nominating Committee chairs involved and publish a report on the results of the experiment. The IESG must then also begin a community discussion of whether to amend [RFC8713] in time for the 2023 Nominating Committee cycle.¶

3. Goals

The goals of the additional criteria are as follows:¶

• Mitigate the issue of active remote (or rarely in-person) participants being disenfranchised in the NomCom and recall processes.¶
• Prepare for an era in which face-to-face plenary meetings are less frequent (thus extending the issue to many, perhaps a majority, of participants).¶
• Ensure that those eligible are true "participants" with enough current understanding of IETF practice and people to make informed decisions.¶
• The criteria must be algorithmic so that the Secretariat can check them mechanically.¶

4. Criteria

There will be several alternative paths to qualification, replacing the single criterion in section 4.14 of [RFC8713]. Any one of the paths is sufficient, unless the person is otherwise disqualified under section 4.15 of [RFC8713]:¶

• Path 1: As per [RFC8713], the person has attended 3 out of the last 5 in-person IETF meetings.¶

  • This criterion has been retained for backward compatibility. It has not been extended to include remote participation in meetings, since the additional criteria below are intended to capture significant participation without regard to meeting attendance.¶
• Path 2: Has been a WG Chair or Secretary, or a BOF Chair, within the last 3 years.¶
• Path 3: (Feedback on path 3 from draft-01 was uniformly negative so ignore this, we'll leave placeholder text here for now just to avoid renumbering.)¶
• Path 4: Has served in the IESG or IAB, or has been appointed to a formal role by the IESG or IAB, within the last 5 years.¶
• Path 5: Has been a listed author of at least 2 IETF stream RFCs and/or WG-adopted drafts within the last 5 years.¶

5. Open Questions

• Should we consider how many nomcom voting members qualify via which paths? For example, would it be ok if all 10 nomcom voting members qualified via path 4 in one year?¶
• Certain criteria were rejected as not truly indicating effective IETF participation. These included authorship of individual Internet-Drafts, sending email to IETF lists, reviewing drafts, etc. Since the criteria must be objectively and mechanically measurable, no qualitative evaluation of an individual's contributions is considered.¶

6. Available data

An analysis of how some of the above criteria would affect the number of NomCom-qualified participants if applied in June 2020 has been performed. The results are presented below in Venn diagrams as Figure 1 to Figure 4. Note that the numbers shown may differ slightly from manual counts due to database mismatches.¶

7. Possible Future Work

• Combined paths (e.g., a person who partly satisfies Path 2 and Path 5); otherwise known as a "points system". That seems to involve work/complexity either for the secretariat or for the volunteer.¶
• Tweaking the "time decay" in each of the path definitions that ensures recent participation is more highly valued.¶
• Separating the NomCom volunteer criteria from the recall petitioner criteria.¶

8. IANA Considerations

This document makes no request of IANA.¶

9. Security Considerations

This document should not affect the security of the Internet.¶

10. Acknowledgements

Useful comments were received from John Klensin, Warren Kumari, Michael Richardson, Martin Thomson, (to be completed)¶

The data analysis was mainly done by Robert Sparks.¶

Appendix A. Change Log

Authors' Addresses