[ARIN-consult] Community Consultation on Increasing the Size of the ARIN Board of Trustees

[Owen DeLong]

I am not inherently opposed to adding 3 seats as a tool for increasing diversity if the three seats have some additional requirements on them which help to achieve that diversity. Adding 3 more white dudes to the board won’t do anything to help diversity and comes with all of the problems described by Bill Herrin.

If we’re going to go to a 9- (elected) seat board, I would think it not unreasonable to require 1/3rd of the board come from each of the designated sub-regions within the ARIN territory — US, CA, Caribbean.

We’d be electing 3 members to the board each year, so it would not, IMHO, be unreasonable to also require that the nomcom produce at least one candidate of each gender for each seat (where I limit gender to {M,F} and base it on declared gender without regard to whatever may have occurred prior to that decision).

Absent these additional requirements or something like it, however, I don’t see this as a useful proposal and oppose implementing it.

Owen

> On May 12, 2017, at 15:49 , Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On May 13, 2017, at 6:12 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>> The size of effective decision-making bodies has been studied. A lot. Essentially every study says: odd number. As for which odd number...
>> seven:  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rule-of-7-the-ideal-work-group-size/
>> 4.6 (five): https://sheilamargolis.com/2011/01/24/what-is-the-optimal-group-size-for-decision-making/
>> 20 or more tend to deadlock and for some weird reason exactly 8 is very bad: http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/01/15/the-right-or-wrong-size-for-a/ 
>> The most common numbers the studies report as an optimal size for decision-making bodies seem to be five and seven.
> 
> So we’re past 4.6, past 5, now we’re past 7 and have arrived at the worst possible number of 8.
> 
> I’d agree that 4.6-5 is good, and in my experience, out of 7, there are always a couple of non-participants, so it always wound up being more like five active participants anyway.
> 
> Full disclosure: my wife’s work has took me and my family to Hong Kong at the end of January, and we’re just returning to the States next Monday, so for the better part of the last four months, I’ve been the non-participant.
> 
>                                -Bill
> 
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> 
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