Subject: PROPOSED GUIDELINE: balance

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 16:35:31 +0200

I've already suggested some guideline text on turnover vs. continuity.

I think we need something similar on balance.

  The nominating committee is called upon to consider the general balance of the
  membership of the IAB and IESG. Factors to be considered include technical skills
  and areas of specialisation, and managerial and organisational skills. In the case
  of the IAB in particular, with its external liaison role, the international 
  distribution of its membership should also be considered.

I think the reasons for this are obvious, and we've occasionally had NomComs
that overlooked the international question. 

    Brian

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 09:38:26 -0500

I'm sorry Brian, I missed something. What is the international question that
some NomComs have overlooked?

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 11:59:41 -0500

Looking at the document, I notice that it gives very little help to the 
nomcom with regard to what qualifications it should look for.  It states 
that the body providing the list of openings can provide qualification 
information.  It says that the nomcom should act according to the 
communities understandings of the qualifications for the jobs.  And it 
stops there.

It seems to me that some informative guidelines (not rules) might well be 
of assistance to the nominating committee.  These could start with the 
obvious, like
proposed ADs must be technically competent within their area
and could then go on to include a number of additional useful observations, 
such as Brian's suggestion that IAB appointments should keep in mind the 
resulting breadth with regard to technical and international coverage.
We could also include information about the fact that the IESG tasks are 
principally managerial and that managerial and inter-personal skills are 
important to the job.

If folks want to keep these guidelines short,
for the IAB I would focus on balance
for the IESG I would focus on the need for technical (in area) AND 
managerial competence.

I would be interested in hearing from nomcom participants as to whether 
such guidelines would have been helpful.

Thank you,
Joel M. Halpern

At 04:35 PM 4/3/2002 +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription
>manager: <http://lists.elistx.com/subscribe>

---

From: Russ White <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 12:54:47 -0500 (EST)

For the IAB they would have been. Should the nomcom look or
balance in technical coverage on the iab? Or not? For instance...

Russ

> >that overlooked the international question.

__________________________________
[email-masked] CCIE <>< Grace Alone

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 10:11:57 +0200

> some NomComs have overlooked?

Having a reasonable number of people from outside North America on board.

   Brian

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 17:56:41 +0700

Date:        Wed, 03 Apr 2002 12:54:47 -0500 (EST)
    From:        Russ White <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | For the IAB they would have been. Should the nomcom look or
[...]

One think that should be made clear is that the nomcom can ask
questions (especially where they don't involve specific nominees)
of anyone they like.

If the nomcom had a question about what the makeup of the IAB should
be, they could ask the IAB, the IESG, the ISOC, or the whole IETF
(via the list, or if the question arose before the December IETF
meeting, at the plenary).

I thought this was already fairly clear, but if more words need to be
added to say that, then I suspect that can be done easily enough.

That is, the nomcom isn't required to simply take the instruction they're
issued at the start of the process ("fill these slots ...") and work
on that with no further input from the community (other than whether
some individual is good or bad for some job).

I'm not sure that embedding any particular guidelines in the nomcom doc
is a good thing - the desirable attributes tend to change over time,
which is very easy to handle in e-mail to the nomcom but much harder if
there is some suggestion buried in an RFC.   If the nomcom was faced
with choosing either someone who provided an attribute suggested by
the nomcom RFC, or choosing one who satisfied some requirement communicated
to it by the current IAB, but couldn't satisfy both, which should it
prefer?    My guess is that the RFC being the "will of the IETF" would
win, it would have to - but that's almost certainly not the best outcome.

kre

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 13:09:00 +0200

> win, it would have to - but that's almost certainly not the best outcome.

Which is why any guidelines need to governed by a disclaimer, stating that
they are only guidelines and not binding rules.

   Brian

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 07:37:58 -0500

Brian,

If the need arises from our controlling authority (DARPA) roots, then it is
sufficient to simply have a reasonable number of people from outside North
America [1] on board.

If the need arises from our experiences, interests, and abilities, then
we don't appear to have significantly expanded these simply by adding any
number of people from outside North America, we have to be more specific.

Eric

[1] Appologies to First Nations, Native American, and Native Alaskans, and
of course, Canadians ;-)

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 20:09:30 +0700

Date:        Thu, 04 Apr 2002 13:09:00 +0200
    From:        Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | Which is why any guidelines need to governed by a disclaimer, stating that
  | they are only guidelines and not binding rules.

Yes, but even with that, the instructions to the nomcom are just
guidelines too - so there's the question of conflicting guidelines.

If we were to put something like this in the nomcom doc now, we would
be expressing our current desires, not necessarily those that will even
apply when the next nomcom starts, let alone all the others that will
pass before anyone has the energy to revise this doc again.

I think I'd just leave them out, and make it more clear that better
guidance should be given when the nomcom is created, and that if the
nomcom is still unclear which direction it should go, it should ask.

kre

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 15:15:30 +0200

> nomcom is still unclear which direction it should go, it should ask.

That was my view few years ago. But I think we've lost some folklore
over the years, and I think writing it down is the lesser evil. It
could be a separate document from RFC2727bis.

   Brian

   Brian

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 15:20:38 +0200

> number of people from outside North America, we have to be more specific.

No, for the reasons kre gave, I think we simply have to state the issue,
but leave the details to the common sense of the NomCom.
> [1] Appologies to First Nations, Native American, and Native Alaskans, and

Well indeed. That's exactly the kind of thing we *don't* want to write down,
along with a lot of other "political" issues. 

   Brian

-- 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Brian E Carpenter 
Distinguished Engineer, Internet Standards & Technology, IBM 
On assignment at the IBM Zurich Laboratory, Switzerland
Board Chairman, Internet Society http://www.isoc.org
INET 2002, Washington, DC, 18-21 June http://www.inet2002.org

---

From: Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 06:22:48 -0800

>Having a reasonable number of people from outside North America on board.

But the random process of selection insures that no country will be 
favored. Of course if the majority of volunteers is from North America...

I understand the problem and dearly sympathize with it, but any change to 
the random nature of selection would not be good. Heck, maybe someday we'll 
have a randomly picked nomcom with the majority from outside the U.S.

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 09:56:08 -0500

Brian,

What _is_ the issue? Continent of residency?

When I look, with all the limitations of my own eyes, at the people who have
made policy in the IAB and IESG in the problem domain of character sets, and
memory-aligned fundamental types, I just don't see a lot of expertise.

We study flow symmetry, but we appear to believe that our practice either
isn't simularity-encouraging, or that it isn't a problem because in principle
it isn't a problem. [insert sunscreen here]

The v6 trampoline code had the comment /* You are not expected to understand
this.*/  I clearly don't understand the international question, if it can be
answered by substituting one bunch of nationals by another bunch of nationals.

I don't care about musical chairs. I do care about expertise. Of course, the
problem area could be out of scope, or I could be completely mistaken. I've
heard both points of view expressed.

Please consider responding without using the keyword "politics", just treat
this as if we'd just discovered that we'd limited transport or applications
clue, nothing scarrier, and that there may be more to this detail (thanks kre)
than second guessing some other standards body. Using "fiddlesticks" is fine.

Eric

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 17:30:59 +0200

No, we're talking about balance on the IAB in particular.

   Brian

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 22:40:09 +0700

Date:        Thu, 04 Apr 2002 06:22:48 -0800
    From:        Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | But the random process of selection insures that no country will be 
  | favored. Of course if the majority of volunteers is from North America...

The criteria for being a volunteer are *heavily* biased in favour of
North American residents.   The requirement states that you must have
attended 2 of the past 3 IETF meetings.   Guess how many of the last 3
IETF meetings will have been in North America?   And guess how many
will have been in any other particular region of the world...

It turns out I have been eligible to volunteer for the nomcom exactly
once - I did volunteer, and missed selection.   While I spent 4 years on
the IAB, and have (briefly) been a WG chair, a doc editor, ... I have
not otherwise been eligible for the nomcom.

  | I understand the problem and dearly sympathize with it, but any change to 
  | the random nature of selection would not be good.

It wasn't the nomcom that was meant, no-one is suggesting changing the
method of selection there (though changing the eligibility comes up
again and again - and since the nomcom doc is being revised, that's an
issue that should probably be considered yet again).

The issue who who the nomcom should appoint to the IAB, and what guidance
they should be given.

kre

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 17:42:51 +0200

I can't reply without the p-word; like it or not the IAB in particular
does have a degree of political visibility and I can assure you that
the absence or presence of non-N-American members *is* noticed, outside
N America. But in general, if the IAB doesn't have a variety of perspectives 
on board, it will miss things about the Internet at large. This isn't about
tokenism; it's about breadth of view. And my point is only that international
balance is just one of the issues the NomCom should consider. Or to put it
another way, skill & experience in international aspects of the Internet
is one of the types of expertise to be considered.

(I consider that having spent a number of years sitting at the wrong end
of a long thin pipe under the Atlantic was one of my own qualifications 
for joining the IAB.)

   Brian

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 10:51:57 -0500

> No, we're talking about balance on the IAB in particular.

Agreed.

Eric

---

From: Leslie Daigle <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 13:20:38 -0500

Here's a reply without the p-word:  the realities of backbones
and network usage vary significantly from continent to continent,
and therefore the picture of what needs to be done in terms
of architecture and protocol development varies.

You can argue that anyone who works with routing _ought_ to
understand the global picture, but the fact is that having
people steeped in different localities helps.

I would never want to have rules/guidelines saying X from
each continent, but the general principle of not having a 
single continent's view seems a good one.

Leslie.

-- 

-------------------------------------------------------------------
"An essential element of a successful journey
    is recognizing when you have arrived."
   -- ThinkingCat

Leslie Daigle
[email-masked]
-------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 14:09:29 -0500

> meeting, at the plenary).

International representation was certainly mentioned as something
important to consider, but not necessarily as being more important
than other issues.

I have heard at least a few people comment that this year's IAB slate
resulted in a "dramatic step backwards" in terms of international
representation on the IAB, and that this might hurt the IAB's
credibility in certain regions of the world, such as Europe and Asia.
The extreme version of this complaint is that in order to improve
IAB's credibility when dealing with I18N and ISO/ECMA issues, Nomcom
should use an Quota-based, Affirmative Action plan to select at least
some number of non-North American (preferably a non-native English
speaker and preferably not residing in an English-speaking country)
candidates on the IAB.

(n.b.  I doubt most of the people who were unhappy about the resulting
international representation would be happy with a quota based
approach; I just used an extreme option to make a point.)

Some people might think that paying attention to the overall
international representation on a body is naturally part of RFC
2727's, "superior candidate" wording, but I'm not convinced; it's so
vague that it can mean anything, which means it means nothing.  

So if there is ever a question about picking the "best" technical
candidate from the U.S., and someone who is "not-quite-as-good, but
still quite decent" candidate from a non-North American country, what
should the nomcom do?  Different people will have different ideas of
what constitutes "superior".  I'd much rather have this discussion
publically, even if we can only have it at an abstract level, instead
of having it closed doors.

> win, it would have to - but that's almost certainly not the best outcome.

I suppose the question is how frequently do we think the desireable
attributes change over time?  If we think they change very frequently,
then I could imagine a process where every year, there is a 2 month
window where there is an open discussion mailing list where selection
criteria in the abstract (no names, or actual candidates would be
discussed)for the IAB and IESG could be aired.  This could serve as
additional input to the nomcom.

If we think they change every 3-7 years, then I'd argue that it should
be codified in an RFC, and we should simply remember to revisit and
re-update the RFC every couple of years.

However we do it, I very strongly believe that the selection criteria
is something that should be discussed publically, and not left in a
secret, smoke-filled room.  Let's only keep secret those things which
really need to be kept secret.

						- Ted

P.S.  Actually, with respect to the international representation
issue, a much more moderate position is that Nomcom should spend a lot
of time searching out and arm-twisting non-North American candidates
and getting them to agree to be consider --- since there are qualified
people out there, it just might take more effort to find them.  One of
the other benefits of having a more stretched-out timescale is that we
would have more time to find such folks.  In the current time-scale,
things are really very rushed, and it makes it a lot harder to spend
time focusing on niceties such as spending time to do arm-twisting
just because there's "not enough candidates from the Asia-Pacific Rim"
or "not enough candidates from Europe".

---

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 14:19:30 -0500

> nomcom is still unclear which direction it should go, it should ask.

Yes, but who will the nomcom ask?  Probably the the IAB, the IESG, or
the ISOC BoT.  While I have a lot of respect for folks who serve on
that capacity, I think I'd be a little happier of the criteria came
from a broader range of IETF members, via some kind of open process.

						- Ted

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 16:14:07 -0500

Howdy Leslie,

Brian's parenthetical remark about being at the end of PILC pipe is a
diversity claim. Now I suspect there's more to this diversity than the
latency/bandwidth of a trans-oceanic hop -- his connectivity within a
region (the UK), and protocols used (Coloured Book, JANET), other bits
of local interoperability.

Now if all that came out of the working groups that the IESG and IAB
add value to, either in managerial roles, or even in roles of technical 
contribution, were PILCish sorts of stuff -- fat pipes, skinny pipes,
address table lookups [1] -- shuffling streams of blind octets, then the
breadth of view could be met by core router and modum vendors, but they'd
all be vendors. Or backbone operators and wee little ISPs, but they'd
all be service providers. Or ...

Someone most of us know wrote to me recently and incidently lamented how
little money has gone into research in the last decade. 

Al Mandel is a friend of mine, and he is currently serving as Tribal Chair
of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Nation. He wrote to me asking what I know about
wireless, as his Tribe receieved a TOP grant from the US DOC to establish
a broadband wireless network on the reservation. 

He's at the end of an interesting latency/bandwidth hop too.

Breadth of view may mean more than a trans-oceanic backbone cabal [2].

But not everything we (collectively) do is shuffling streams of blind octets,
we look at an awful lot of them. You wrote rfc2825, so this isn't news to you. 

So I was in China twice last year, and I learned:
	o China is smaller than MIT, or BBN or ... in fact, most of China can
	  be made to fit in either the San Jose or San Francisco convention
	  centers -- where I used to build InterOp shownets for the good
	  company and fine toys, in ipv4 addr allocation terms,
	o Every instance of IE in China attempts to send packets to Redmond,
	  and Redwood City, causing overseas bandwidth consumption,
	o Every instance of IE in China is also broken when a UTF-8 encoded
	  character is processed in as part of a URI, also causing (see above),
	o traceroutes between any two points involves a 0.5 second delay
	  a lot more frequently than I've become used to since the CMU
	  outage in December 1988 and we all had to go vertical (MIT-SRI or
	  BBN-ISI)
	o something about the DNS, that we're now all certain I simply got
	  dead wrong.
If I'd stayed there any longer, maybe I'd have learned more.

Well, I've written enough. If, at the end, is it as Brian put it, it is
	"skill & experience in international aspects of the Internet"
then either its some PILCish S&E the nomcom could be seeking, or it is some
"international" thingee the nomcom could be seeking. In either case, IMHO,
both Al out at Pyramid Lake, and quite a few people in Beijing have the same,
or better, breadth of view value as a hypothetical mid-Atlantic person, and
it is possible that the absence of their contribution to the IAB and IESG is
not hypothetical at all.

If I haven't been completely clear, I don't see any reason not to request
the nomcom attempt to prefer qualified women over equally qualified men,
and qualified Asians over equally qualified Europeans and Americans. It is
difficult to imagine who would be worse off by being serious about breadth
of view.

Thanks for the long note Ted.

Eric

[1] Sung to the tune of the Armour Hotdog jingle
	"Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on ricks,
	 tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chicken pox
	 love hotdogs, Armour hot dogs, the dogs kids love to bite."

[1] Appologies to Erik Fair and others who _are_ The BackBone Cabal (tm).

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 17:03:17 -0500

> of having it closed doors.

The question won't exist.  An international perspective is one of the
attributes you should measure in choosing someone for the IAB, because
the only way you measure it usefully is in how it is reflected in
technical issues such as the astounding character set complexities.
Thus it gets included in technical competence -- as relevant to IAB-type
issues.

---

From: Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 14:04:30 -0800

>will have been in any other particular region of the world...

Well a great many of us American's fly to the foreign locations for IETF's 
so I don't know why others can't fly here. In fact, most anyone who is 
serious about their involvement in standards has to fly an awful lot what 
with RIPE, APNIC, ISOC, ITU, ETSI, etc meetings all over the world. If it's 
not important, you don't go. That's a good way to filter out nomcom 
volunteers who don't see the IETF as really important. I know travel sucks 
for folks who live down under, but that's the burden you bear for living in 
paradise. :)

>The issue who who the nomcom should appoint to the IAB, and what guidance

Apologies for getting emails mixed up. This is a busy list.

As for guidance, that is simple. The nomcom should consider the outlook or 
world view of any candidate, be they for IESG or IAB. If that world-view is 
limited to the United States, that's a serious knock against a candidate in 
my opinion.

---

From: Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 15:36:41 -0800

If someone wants to add a sentence such as "It is highly desirable that 
members of the IETF leadership have global viewpoints and experience beyond 
that of their nations of residence.", that would be fine with me. But 
otherwise we should assume that the talent pool of nomcom volunteers plus 
liaison's includes enough people who already know this and don't need to be 
prompted.

Also, people should note that you don't have to be born in a particular 
country to have a good world-view. Many of the new IAB members were judged 
by at least some of us as not being US-centric so I don't know where the 
"step-backwards" statement comes from.

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 09:48:44 +0200

--On torsdag, april 04, 2002 14:09:29 -0500 Theodore Tso <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> should the nomcom do?

If a candidate for IAB is "brilliant in routing, but clueless about 
anything but English", and another candidate is "average in routing, but 
knows a LOT about how non-US people interact with computers", I don't think 
it's obvious that one is the "superior" candidate.

If the nomcom thinks that being non-North American is important, then being 
non-North American will make that candidate superior, all other things 
being equal.

No contradiction, but not much help either :-)

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 07:29:50 -0500

Matt Holdrege <[email-masked]> writes:

> so I don't know why others can't fly here.

For most US IETF participants, our participation would drop
significantly if most of the meetings were held outside of the US. Not
for *all*, but for most. So perhaps *you* would still be able to go to
all the meetings, but a good chunk of US folks that currently do would
no longer. Correspondingly, we'd see an increase in relative
participation from folks outside the US. In other words, the notion
that those that go to IETF meetings now would go no matter where the
meetings were held is just plain naive.

Point of fact. We've had non-US I* members miss meetings in recent
years for some meetings because they couldn't get travel
authorization/funding. I suspect that the distance/cost of the travel
just might have been a factor.

Thomas

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 08:02:44 -0500

Only a data point, but last Fall I was asked to assit with US Visa
invitation letter production, then being able to meet the requirements
imposed by the US Counselate in Beijing with slightly greater alacrity
than the ICANN and IETF Secretariates.

Between the US (yes, it has _surprising_ issues with visa applicants from
the PRC) and the PRC (yes, it considered post-911 travel to the US a risk
for its citizens), the initial pool of participants yeilded only 4 and 1
actual attendees, out of 6 and 11 applicatants, respectively.

This may be a transient, but meetings _in_ the US result in non-attendence
by some ID authors, for policy as well as the distance/cost reasons which
Thomas points out.

One quibble with the premise:

	For most US IETF participants, our participation would drop
	significantly if most of the meetings were held outside of the
	US.

I don't think this would be the case if meetings in North America were in
Mexico or Canada.

Eric

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 20:40:50 +0700

Date:        Thu, 4 Apr 2002 14:09:29 -0500
    From:        Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | Different people will have different ideas of
  | what constitutes "superior".  I'd much rather have this discussion
  | publically, even if we can only have it at an abstract level, instead
  | of having it closed doors.

Absolutely, that's what I was trying to suggest, when I said the nomcom
should ask ("start a discussion" might have been better than "ask").

In another message you asked "who should they ask?" - for that, it
depends upon the question, but everyone reading the ietf mailing list
would be a good choice for some questions.    Or perhaps nomcoms should
get into the habit of running a public mailing list of their own
(something just like the ietf list, but with a limited scope, to avoid
bothering people o the ietf list who don't care - with just an announcement
sent to the ietf-announce list when there's a new topic for discussion).

Other times, just asking the IAB, or IESG, or something might be more
appropriate - it will depend upon the question.

  | I suppose the question is how frequently do we think the desireable
  | attributes change over time?

They probably shouldn't change all that often, but the ones that seem
to be important seem to alter every year.   A few years ago, there was
a burning desire for more apps knowledgable people on the IAB, from
what's being said here, perhaps next year there will be a strong desire
for more international reps on the IAB ...

  | If we think they change very frequently,
  | then I could imagine a process where every year, there is a 2 month
  | window where there is an open discussion mailing list where selection
  | criteria in the abstract (no names, or actual candidates would be
  | discussed)for the IAB and IESG could be aired.  This could serve as
  | additional input to the nomcom.

Yes, that's the kind of thing that should be done.

kre

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 16:20:47 +0200

> Yes, that's the kind of thing that should be done.

No problem with any of that. If you look back at the start of this thread,
all I suggested writing down was, effectively, "NomCom should think about
balance", not attempting to codify rules of balance.

    Brian

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 10:03:03 -0500

> for more international reps on the IAB ...

A nuance perhaps, but simply being in one of the "pink bits" (Comonwealth,
as seen from schools), e.g., Austrailia or the UK, meets some unstated
criteria, but if an issue of fundamental (and hopefully transient) interest
arises, relating to, say, character set(s), that unstated criteria hasn't
gotten _us_ much. The same applies if 8859-* is added to ascii, and the "pink"
bits are virtually extended to include the happy-with-8, but not the above-8.

I'm still partial to ebcdic myself, and of course the 360 via the 029. First
loves are like that.

Now we know that the character set problem is solved and besides, it really
is someone else's problem, but if next year there is a "strong desire" for
more "international reps on the I*", this desire should propose to resolve
some specific technical problem(s), which could be as Brian originally cited,
the UK was at one point on the "other side" of a bandwidth/latency divide,
and the North American metro-and-backbone core is not univerally available,
or some other technical problem. This desire should not propose, as some
general proposition about hygine and manners, to replicate ICANN or the ITU's
notions of resource allocation -- between the crypto and raven discussions,
the problem isn't that US national policy would be controlling otherwise, we
are past that in our trajectory from-DARPA-to-<what>. We may have a problem
that some industry segments are more controlling than useful, but this isn't
necessarily a national problem solved by fungible "international reps".

"NomCom should think about balance"

As a general proposition this is insufficient. Had I 20/20 foresight, when
Avri got the NomCom job three years ago, instead of desultory interesting
conversation over bad coffee at NRC, I'd have urged the NomCom look at
a score of people in Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan for I* candidates. 

Eric