Internet-Draft Additional Eligibility Criteria October 2020
Carpenter & Farrell Expires 16 April 2021 [Page]
Workgroup:
Network Working Group
Internet-Draft:
draft-carpenter-eligibility-expand-06
Published:
Intended Status:
Experimental
Expires:
Authors:
B.E. Carpenter
Univ. of Auckland
S. Farrell
Trinity College Dublin

Additional Criteria for Nominating Committee Eligibility

Abstract

This document defines a process experiment under RFC 3933 that temporarily updates the criteria for qualifying volunteers to participate in the IETF Nominating Committee. It therefore also updates the criteria for qualifying signatories to a community recall petition. The purpose is to make the criteria more flexible in view of increasing remote participation in the IETF and a reduction in face-to-face meetings. The experiment is of fixed duration and will apply to one, or at most two, Nominating Committee cycles. This document temporarily varies the rules in RFC 8713.

Discussion Venues

This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.

Discussion of this document takes place on the ad hoc mailing list (eligibility-discuss@ietf.org), which is archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/eligibility-discuss/.

Source for this draft can be found at https://github.com/sftcd/elig.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This Internet-Draft will expire on 16 April 2021.

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, 109 and 110 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.

2. Term and Evaluation of the Experiment

The cancellation of the in-person IETF 107 through 110 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.

4.1. Clarifying Detail

Path 1 does not qualify people who register and attend face-to-face meetings remotely. That is, it does not qualify remote attendees at IETF 106, because that meeting took place prior to any question of cancelling meetings, so the rules of [RFC8713] apply.

If the IESG prolongs this experiment for a second year, as allowed by Section 2, the IESG will also clarify how Path 1 applies to IETF 111, 112 and 113.

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. IANA Considerations

This document makes no request of IANA.

7. Security Considerations

This document should not affect the security of the Internet.

8. Acknowledgements

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

The data analysis was mainly done by Robert Sparks.

9. Normative References

[RFC3933]
Klensin, J. and S. Dawkins, "A Model for IETF Process Experiments", BCP 93, RFC 3933, DOI 10.17487/RFC3933, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3933>.
[RFC8713]
Kucherawy, M., Ed., Hinden, R., Ed., and J. Livingood, Ed., "IAB, IESG, IETF Trust, and IETF LLC Selection, Confirmation, and Recall Process: Operation of the IETF Nominating and Recall Committees", BCP 10, RFC 8713, DOI 10.17487/RFC8713, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8713>.
[RFC8788]
Leiba, B., "Eligibility for the 2020-2021 Nominating Committee", BCP 10, RFC 8788, DOI 10.17487/RFC8788, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8788>.

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".

379 1104 1 29 332 3 102 People eligible via paths 2 or 3: 1541 2020 actual volunteers: 135 People eligible via path 1, 3 of 5 meetings: 842
Figure 1: All paths, before disqualification
375 1104 1 29 300 3 102 Qualified via paths 2 or 3: 1509 2020 actual volunteers: 135 Qualified via path 1, 3 of 5 meetings: 806
Figure 2: All paths, after disqualification
46 1266 2 2 176 22 29 People eligible via path 3 Total: 1493 People eligible via path "I": 55 People eligible via path 2 Total: 253
Figure 3: New paths, before disqualification
45 1264 0 1 172 11 16 Qualified via path 3 Total: 1463 Qualified via path "I": 28 Qualified via path 2 Total: 234
Figure 4: New paths, after disqualification

Appendix B. Change Log

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

B.1. Draft-05 to -06

  • Allowed for IETF 110 decision
  • Resolved open issue
  • Removed "future work" section
  • Editorial improvements

B.2. Draft-04 to -05

  • Adjusted criteria according to comments received
  • Removed previous path 3
  • Renumbered paths
  • Updated diagrams
  • Editorial improvements

B.3. Draft-03 to -04

  • Adjusted criteria according to comments received
  • Shortened period to one year (initially)
  • Renumbered paths
  • Updated diagrams
  • Editorial improvements

B.4. Draft-02 to -03

  • Adjusted criteria according to comments received
  • Added data

B.5. Draft-01 to -02

  • Made this an RFC 3933 process experiment
  • Eliminated path based on directorate reviews, used to be: "Has submitted at least 6 reviews as a member of an official IETF review team within the last 3 years."
  • Other comments from IETF107 virtual gendispatch meeting handled

B.6. Draft-00 to -01

  • Added author

Authors' Addresses

Brian E. Carpenter
The University of Auckland
School of Computer Science
PB 92019
Auckland 1142
New Zealand
Stephen Farrell
Trinity College Dublin
College Green
Dublin
Ireland