[ripe-chair-discuss] RIPE Chair Selection Process
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Carlos Friaças
cfriacas at fccn.pt
Tue Oct 9 00:06:53 CEST 2018
Hi, That was a bit long, i hope i didn't miss anything :-) 1- I don't have any issue with a WG Chair stepping down to possibly become the RIPE Chair (or Vice-Chair, btw) 2- What if the NomCom "seats" could be defined by finding one representative from each WG? i.e. the NomCom candidates present themselves at the WG. 1 person per WG is appointed. The same person shouldn't (or couldn't?) run in more than one WG. 3- Should the "NomCom collective" have some sort of geographic diversity? Best Regards, Carlos On Mon, 8 Oct 2018, Nick Hilliard wrote: > Jim Reid wrote on 08/10/2018 18:02: >> The WG Chair collective will actively gather feedback from the RIPE >> community about each candidate. Based on this feedback, the WG Chair >> collective will select the best candidate for the job. > and here lies the problem. Or more accurately, an entanglement of problems, > none of which can be fully separated from any other. > > The WGCC selects the nomcom, the nomcom selects the candidates and the WGCC > selects the winner, meaning that the WGCC has effectively full selection > control over the entire process. A final acclamation of the new chair-to-be > by the RIPE community is then expected to impart the seal of bottom-up > process to all this. Or not. > > It doesn't help - as Randy noted - that the WGCC's involvement stops any > active WG chair from putting their name into the hat because there are some > very fine people acting as WG chairs at the moment and it seems both > unfortunate and unnecessary to exclude them by dint of their commitment to > other parts of the RIPE community. > > We may wish to put a line into the RIPE chair description to say that that > person cannot be a WG Chair, but categorically excluding all WG chairs from > the RIPE Chair process will either lead to an impoverishment of candidates or > else a rush to resign WG Chair status in order to throw one's hat into the > ring. Neither of these things is necessary or sensible. > > Nor does it help the transparency problem that it is not possible to be part > of either the nomcom control mechanism or the Chair selection process unless > you also happen to be a WG chair. What if someone of good standing wants to > be able on the panel which selects the final candidate, but cannot commit to > the ongoing requirements of being a WG chair? It is hard to reconcile this > with bottom-up thinking. > > Regarding the WGCC, it's a good thing that after 20-odd years of prodding, > the collective started publishing agendas and minutes in 2014, and finally > accepted that their constituents - the WG chairs themselves - needed to be > regularly refreshed. This was a genuine and much needed improvement in how > the collective operated - although it was surprising how and why it operated > the way it did for so long. > > Regular RIPE community members are still not welcome to attend WGCC > convenings and I still have no idea what the WGCC remit includes or what > limits it has. Listening from the other side of the door, it seems to make > some decisions and some recommendations, but all the WGCC people I've ever > talked to about it throw their hands up in the air and proclaim its > uselessness and futility at decision making because - they claim - there are > just too many voices shouting and it's impossible to get anything done. > Maybe this is true, but who knows? > > Maybe too this could be fixed, but this would raise the question of whether > the fixes were being implemented in order to turn the collective into a > suitable body for handling the RIPE Chair selection process, instead of being > implemented than in order to fix problems with the WGCC that needed to be > fixed anyway, and probably needed to be fixed many years ago. Which brings > us back to question of suitability for purpose: are the RIPE Community's > interests going to be best served by a collective with poorly defined > processes which has only acted to reform itself when forced to do so, or > would it be better if we had a different process for handling the chair > selection process? > > You could argue that the WGCC is a body of people which would probably return > a reasonable selection result, and I might even agree with this to some > extent: there are some very fine people in the collective. But it is > important to draw a distinction between the collective as a single unit and > the people who make up the collective unit. Collective bodies - > "committees", if you like - often come out with results which don't > necessarily match well with the sum of wisdom of their individual members. > > I think we owe it to the RIPE community to come up with a process which is > bottom-up, as well as looking as if it's bottom-up. Right now, we're not > there on either point. > > Nick >
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