[ripe-chair-discuss] RIPE Chair Selection Process

> On 9 Oct 2018, at 08:42, Nurani Nimpuno <nurani at nimblebits.net> wrote:
> 
> As others have pointed out, when we select our WG chairs, we do so for their competence and ability to chair a particular WG, not because we elect them as some sort of general “RIPE community elders” to whom we give all the deciding powers in the community in all sorts of different areas. This concept worries me greatly. 

Nurani, I share these concerns. And I’m also very uneasy about WGCC mission creep. [Personally speaking, I’d close down the WGCC completely. It rarely does anything useful and most of the time isn’t needed. Its role in the PDP could go away IMO.] However in the context of the RIPE Chair selection, we currently have a bootstrapping problem and the WGCC seems to be the most pragmatic and possibly the only way to solve it.

Some group which has community standing needs to somehow bootstrap the selection process, particularly launching the Nomcom. The WGCC is effectively the only game in town. Its members have been selected by the community through open and transparent processes. There’s no other group in the RIPE community which has that attribute. So if we don’t want the WGCC to take on this role, who else could do it? We might well argue about whether the WGCC has the expertise to do the job, but that’s a question of implementation. At present we’re trying to figure out how to bootstrap things in our usual open, transparent and bottom-up manner and who/what could do that.

If you have a better suggestion than the WGCC (or even having a Nomcom), let’s hear it!

How about a Nomcom to appoint the Nomcom? But then who chooses the NomNomCom? :-)

Sometimes we simply have to settle for the "good enough” rather than the perfect. That’s just sound engineering.