Re: Thinking about adding another AD in the General(ish) area

[Thomas Narten <narten@us.ibm.com>]

Harald,

This is a good thread to explore. Thanks for bringing it up. I also
assume you've thought about this for a while and that you are looking
for both of the following:

- offloading the GEN area to someone else
- some help in what are essentially chair duties, not AD duties

If the first were to happen, would the second still be required. I'm
reading your answer as yes, based on this thread, but it would be good
to be clear on this.

IMO, it is suboptimal that the chair runs the GEN (or any) area. In
the past, this might have been OK, i.e., when there wasn't that much
going on in those areas (and the chair had fewer things to juggle).

But, organizationally, I think there are advantages to having the
chair not be directly involved in WG management stuff the way other
ADs are. It is better for the chair to be a bit removed from that, but
of course doing the managerial thing of watching for general problems
and stepping in when it seems like something isn't going right. This
is generally easier to do if one can act impartialy because one isn't
directly involved. I.e., folks can in some sense appeal to the chair,
and it's the chair's job to go straighten things out, or at least try.

Thus, I actually think that if the GEN area is significant load, we
should ask the nomcom to find a new GEN AD, and the chair should hand
it off completely to the new AD. Procedurally, I suspect this is
relatively clean. Heck, if the load for this position is actually
relatively low compared to other areas, that is probably a plus for
recruting purposes!

Creating or asking for an assistant chair is a bit trickier. Is this
something like the Executive Director the IAB has? Or is it more? I
also wonder if this position should also be focussed on upper layer
stuff, rather than running any of the areas.

Thomas