Status of This Memo

This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for examination, experimental implementation, and evaluation.¶

This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents approved by the IESG are candidates for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.¶

Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained athttps://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8989.¶

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Table of Contents

1.Introduction

According to[RFC8713], the IETF Nominating Committee (NomCom) is populatedfrom a pool of volunteers with a specified record of attendance atIETF plenary meetings, which were assumed to be face-to-face meetingswhen that document was approved. In view of the cancellation of the IETF 107,108, 109, and 110 face-to-face meetings; the risk of future cancellations; theprobability of less-frequent face-to-face meetings in the future in supportof sustainability; and a general increase in remote participation, thisdocument defines a process experiment[RFC3933]of fixed duration (described inSection 2) to use modified andadditional criteria to qualify volunteers.¶

During this experiment, the eligibility criteria for signing recall petitions -- which[RFC8713] defines to be the same as those for NomCom eligibility -- are consequently also modified as described in this document. This experiment has no other effect on the recall process.¶

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 caseseriously perturbed for at least 2 years. The experiment thereforeneeds to start as soon as possible. However, the experiment did not applyto the selection of the 2020-2021 NomCom,which was performed according to[RFC8788].¶

The experiment will initially cover the IETF NomCom cyclethat begins in 2021. As soon as the entire 2021-2022 NomCom is seated,the IESG must consult the 2021-2022 NomCom Chair and the 2020-2021NomCom Chair (who will maintain NomCom confidentiality)and publish areport on the results of the experiment. Points to be considered are whetherthe experiment has produced a sufficiently large and diverse pool ofindividuals, whether enough of those individuals have volunteered toproduce a representative NomCom with good knowledgeof the IETF, and whether all the goals inSection 3have been met. If possible, a comparison with results from the previous procedure(i.e., RFC 8713) should be made.¶

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

1. Amend[RFC8713] in time for the 2022-2023 NomCom cycle; or¶
2. Prolong the current experiment for a second and final year with additional clarifications specific to the 2022-2023 cycle; or¶
3. Run a different experiment for the next nominating cycle; or¶
4. Revert to[RFC8713].¶

The IESG will announce the resultsof the consensus determination of this discussionin good time for the 2022-2023 NomCom cycle to commence.¶

In the event of prolongation of this experiment for a second year, the IESG will repeatthe consultation, report, and community discussion process accordingly, but thisdocument lapses at the end of the 2022-2023 NomCom cycle.¶

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.¶
• Enable the selection of a 2021-2022 NomCom, and possibly a 2022-2023 NomCom, when it is impossible for anyone to have attended 3 out of the last 5 IETF meetings in person.¶
• 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 have enough current understanding of IETF practices and people to make informed decisions.¶
• Provide algorithmic criteria, so that the Secretariat can check them mechanically against available data.¶

4.Criteria

This experiment specifies several alternative paths to qualification, replacing the single criterion inSection 4.14 of [RFC8713]. Any one of the paths is sufficient, unless the person is otherwise disqualified underSection 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 count as attendance. For the 2021-2022 NomCom, the meetings concerned will be IETF 106, 107, 108, 109, and 110. Attendance is as determined by the record keeping of the Secretariat for in-person meetings and is based on being a registered person who logged in for at least one session of an online IETF meeting.¶

Path 2:

The person has been a Working Group Chair or Secretary within the 3 years prior to the day the call for NomCom volunteers is sent to the community.¶

Path 3:

The person has been a listed author or editor (on the front page) of at least two IETF Stream RFCs within the last 5 years prior to the day the call for NomCom volunteers is sent to the community. An Internet-Draft that has been approved by the IESG and is in the RFC Editor queue counts the same as a published RFC, with the relevant date being the date the draft was added to the RFC Editor queue. For avoidance of doubt, the 5-year timer extends back to the date 5 years before the date when the call for NomCom volunteers is sent to the community.¶

Notes:¶

• Path 1 corresponds approximately to[RFC8713], modified as per[RFC8788].¶
• Path 3 includes approved drafts, since some documents spend a long time in the RFC Editor's queue.¶
• 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.¶
• All the required data are available to the IETF Secretariat from meeting attendance records or the IETF Datatracker.¶

5.Omitted Criteria

During community discussions of this document, 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 Working-Group-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 has no IANA actions.¶

7.Security Considerations

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

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 Figures1 through4. 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 lists of remote attendees 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, andFigure 2 removes those disqualified according to RFC 8713. The actual 2020 volunteer pool is shown too.¶

Figures3 and4 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 (Section 5) is also shown, as Path "I". The data clearly show that Path "I" has no practical value.¶

Acknowledgements

Useful comments were received fromAbdussalam Baryun,Alissa Cooper,Lars Eggert,Adrian Farrel,Bron Gondwana,Russ Housley,Christian Huitema,Ben Kaduk,John Klensin,Victor Kuarsingh,Warren Kumari,Barry Leiba,Eric Rescorla,Michael Richardson,Rich Salz,Ines Robles,Martin Thomson, andMagnus Westerlund.¶

The data analysis was mainly done byRobert Sparks.Carsten Bormann showed how to represent Venn diagrams in ASCII art.¶

Authors' Addresses