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 meetings, assumed when that document was approved to be face-to-face meetings. In view of the cancellation of the IETF 107, 108 and 109 face-to-face meetings, the risk of future cancellations, the probability of less frequent face-to-face meetings in future in support of sustainability, and a general increase in remote participation, this document defines a process experiment [RFC3933] of fixed duration (described in Section 2) to use modified and 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 6.¶

2. Term and Evaluation of the Experiment

The cancellation of the in-person IETF 107, 108 and 109 meetings means 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 did not apply to the selection of the 2020-2021 Nominating Committee, which was performed according to [RFC8788].¶

The experiment will initially cover the IETF Nominating Committee cycle starting in 2021. As soon as the 2021-2022 Nominating Committee is seated, the IESG must consult the current and previous Nominating Committee chairs and publish a report on the results of the experiment. Points to be considered are whether the experiment has produced a sufficiently large and diverse pool of individuals, and whether enough of those individuals have volunteered to produce a representative Nominating Committee with good knowledge of the IETF.¶

The IESG must then also begin a community discussion of whether to:¶

1. Amend [RFC8713] in time for the 2022 Nominating Committee cycle; or¶
2. Prolong the current experiment for a second year; or¶
3. Run a different experiment for the next nominating cycle; or¶
4. Revert to [RFC8713].¶

The IESG will determine and announce the consensus of this discussion in good time for the 2022 Nominating Committee cycle to commence.¶

3. Goals

The goals of the modified and 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 practices and people to make informed decisions.¶
• The criteria must be algorithmic so that the Secretariat can check them mechanically against available data.¶

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: The person has registered for and attended 3 out of the last 5 IETF meetings. For meetings held entirely online, online registration and attendance counts as attendance. For the 2021-2022 Nominating Committee, the meetings concerned will be IETF 106, 107, 108, 109, and 110.¶

• Path 2: Has been a WG Chair or Secretary within the last 3 years.¶
• Path 3: Has been a listed author of at least 2 IETF stream RFCs within the last 5 years. An Internet-Draft that has been approved by the IESG and is in the RFC Editor queue counts.¶

Notes:¶

• Path 1 corresponds approximately to [RFC8713], modified as per [RFC8788].¶
• Path 3 extends to 5 years because it commonly takes 3 or 4 years for new documents to be approved in the IETF stream, so 3 years would be too short a sampling period.¶

5. Omitted Criteria

Certain criteria were rejected as not truly indicating effective IETF participation, or as being unlikely to significantly expand the volunteer pool. These included authorship of individual or WG-adopted Internet-Drafts, sending email to IETF lists, reviewing drafts, acting as a BOF Chair, and acting in an external role for the IETF (liaisons etc.).¶

One path, service in the IESG or IAB within the last 5 years, was found to have no benefit since historical data show that such people always appear to be qualified by another path.¶

Since the criteria must be measurable by the Secretariat, no qualitative evaluation of an individual's contributions is considered.¶

6. Possible Future Work

These items are listed for possible future discussions or experiments, beyond the timescale of the 2021-2022 nominating cycle.¶

• Should we consider how many nomcom voting members qualify via which paths? For example, would it be acceptable if all 10 nomcom voting members qualified via the same path in one year?¶
• Combined paths (e.g., a person who partly satisfies Path 2 and Path 3); otherwise known as a "points system". That seems to involve work and complexity either for the secretariat or for the volunteer.¶
• Tweaking the "time decay" in each of the path definitions to ensure recent participation is more highly valued.¶
• Separating the NomCom volunteer criteria from the recall petitioner criteria.¶

7. IANA Considerations

This document makes no request of IANA.¶

8. Security Considerations

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

9. Acknowledgements

Useful comments were received from Alissa Cooper, Adrian Farrel, John Klensin, Warren Kumari, Michael Richardson, Rich Salz, and Martin Thomson.¶

The data analysis was mainly done by Robert Sparks.¶

Appendix A. Available data

An analysis of how some of the above criteria would affect the number of NomCom-qualified participants if applied in August 2020 has been performed. The results are presented below in Venn diagrams as Figure 1 to Figure 4. Note that the numbers shown differ slightly from manual counts due to database mismatches, and the results were not derived at the normal time of the year for NomCom formation. The remote attendee lists for IETF 107 and 108 were used, although not yet available on the IETF web site.¶

A specific difficulty is that the databases involved inevitably contain a few inconsistencies such as duplicate entries, differing versions of a person's name, and impersonal authors. (For example, "IAB" qualifies under Path 3, and one actual volunteer artificially appears not to qualify.) This underlines that automatically generated lists of eligible and qualified people will always require manual checking.¶

The first two diagrams illustrate how the new paths (2 and 3) affect eligibility numbers compared to the meeting participation path (1). Figure 1 gives the raw numbers, and Figure 2 removes those disqualified according to RFC 8713. The actual 2020 volunteer pool is shown too.¶

Figure 3 and Figure 4 illustrate how the new paths (2 and 3) interact with each other, also before and after disqualifications. The discarded path via IESG and IAB service is also shown, as path "I".¶

Appendix B. Change Log

This section is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶

Authors' Addresses