Re: guidance on avoiding too many people from one company/group

[Scott W Brim <swb@employees.org>]

Regarding limits on members per institution ... it looks to me like KRE
laid out pretty good reasoning, and at least Brian Carpenter, Steve
Silverman, Donald Eastlake, Harald and I came in for 2 per institution
as well.  Loa raised some good concerns which I think were answered.  As
far as I can tell no new ideas were brought up after the "rough"
consensus on 2 per institution.  We didn't settle on what to do with odd
cases, like different divisions of a large company.  I suggested giving
the NomCom Chair discretion to sort that out.  We can work that out, but
I think we have agreement on "2 per institution".

Dave Crocker also suggests geography and experience as criteria, in
order to drive diversity when selecting from a small pool.  I would like
to to leave them alone for now.

Experience is obviously valuable, but we do have the non-voting members
contributing their experience, and I wonder how much of a problem it is.
Have we had problems with lack of experience before this year, that
non-voting members and advisers haven't covered?  Having a quota for
experienced people means less space for new people with good ideas.  Is
there a net win here?

Geography: Personally I wouldn't mind a nomcom made up entirely of
Japanese, or Canadians, or Ghanaians, or women.  We might learn a few
things.  I understand the feeling some participants have that the IETF
is too dominated by the USA -- because it is -- but that is an artifact
which I expect to change, and I see very little evidence that
it has led to IESG domination by the USA anyway.  So again, the problem
is how
much net benefit there is.  Geography is a difficult area.  Are you
going to give Eritrea a seat?  Just think about all the conflict you're
going to generate while trying to promote geographic diversity.  How
about political viewpoints, and others?  Those would seem to be more
threatening than geographic viewpoint.  This whole area of ensuring
diversity of viewpoints is sensitive and can get pretty messy.  I think
we'll need a lot more discussion, and that we shouldn't push for
resolution for quite a while.

...Scott