Subject: [Diversity] co-chairs

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:03:11 -0400

A number of organizations that I have been a member of has had gender
balanced co-chairs for all positions.  This is sometimes worked well,
and sometimes poorly.
(One such organization, a political party, by law, had to have a single
leader, treasurer and secretary, so we always had a deputy leader of the
opposite gender, and made treasurer/secretary a pair)

When it ran poorly my observation was that really it was two people that
simply didn't work together; it had nothing to do with gender.  We have
lots of cases already in the IETF where two WG co-chairs do not
communicate well enough.

I'd like to suggest that we ask Lynn to start by appointing nomcom
co-chairs.   Yes, finding one nomcom chair might be hard enough, but I
think it could be done.

The nomcom I've just been on had only a single female, which is really
the result of two things in my opinion:  
  1) the nomcom eligibility requirement 
  2) if we are going to encourage women to run for positions, they
     can not also be on the nomcom!

Or, if the input to the process had better gender parity, the randomness
ought to spit out a better result.  This matters only because nomcom chairs
are generally required to have been through the nomcom process, and with
the male bias in the members, the selection of chair is harder.  Looking
through the list of previous nomcom I see only one or two cmte that had
more than one woman, and several that had zero.

The second thing that I think the diversity design team should consider
is changes to the nomcom eligibility requirement such that the criteria
to remain nomcom eligible is much less than to become eligible.
In particular, we have no specific accomodation for remote participation
which we seem to want to encourage.

-- 
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [ 
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [ 
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