[ripe-chair-discuss] RIPE Chair Selection Process

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