AB/strawman-for-nomcom-diversity-guidelines

This is a working draft of straw man for Nom Com diversity guidelines. This document is yet not finalized by AB.

Important points

• The document is currently focused on diversity on the basis of personal characteristics of the candidates. Another important topic to address is to achieve the spectrum of professional skill sets on the board, but it is not the part of the current document.
• It is possible that changes may happen to the overall structure of the BOD based on funding sources, governing assembly proposal, relation with hosts etc. Accordingly the seats for membership would change.
• The proposal is for the candidates for members seats, nominated by nomination committee.
• The guidelines are written with an aspiration of facilitating improvements in the demographic distribution of the elected bodies of W3C.
• The objective of the document is to provide initial guidance to nomination committee, which can be updated by the committee according to the situation.

Assumptions

This document is based on "Board of Directors straw man." Currently there are four seats for membership, out of which two seats will be open for election in a year. Therefore nomination committee would be nominating something like 4 to 6 candidates per year. However the proposal is oriented around percentage values instead of count of seats so that it can be applied to the evolving BOD structure.

Nomination Committee Guidelines

The nomination committee should strive to achieve different aspects of diversities in the set of candidates it proposes for the election. It should strive to achieve the aspirational targets defined in this document over an average of 3 years, and publish a report on the same.

While nominating the candidates, the nomination committee should also take in account the spectrum of diversities in the existing board, including both elected as well as non-elected board members.

Different aspects of diversities

Aspirational targets:

1. Representation of women: at least 40%
2. Representation of people with disabilities: at least 15% (As per WHO statistics).
3. Representation of small and midsized members (with head count of less than 200): at least 40%
4. Geo-cultural diversity: It is important to have representation of industry needs and culture of different parts of the world. The membership of W3C is concentrated in some parts of the world while the community and the users are spread worldwide. The Nom Com should nominate good balance of candidates from different geographies and cultures and ensure that number of candidates from one country or culture does not exceed 30%. The candidates should be well distributed across the geographies and cultures where W3C has strong presence like North America, Europe, Japan and China and Nom Com should do its best efforts to increase the candidates nominated from the geographies and cultures where the presence is low like other parts of Asia, South America, Australia Oceania region and Africa.

The following diversities do not have specific targets, but the Nom Com should do best efforts to prioritize these also:

• People with different skill sets, from different industries. (There is a possibility to have a parameter of having no more than 30% candidates from one industry, but the prerequisite for it is to define industries. This is for consideration in future)
• Ethnic minorities (African American, Indigenous people, Rohingya etc.)
• Discriminated groups (it is generalization of a set of groups which are discriminated, for example discrimination on basis of caste, social status, reverse discrimination etc.)
• LGBTQI+

Note: Nom com needs to ensure that the board has the required skill sets or spectrum of skill sets along with diversities, so that high focus on diversities does not compromise the professional skills.

Text for BOD document

Nom Com will strive for diversity in the candidates, such that long term averages reflect the aspirational balance we would like to achieve in several aspects of diversity. The document detailing the Nom Com diversity guidelines lists the different diversities to achieve, including but not limited to balanced participation of gender identities, representatives from different parts of the world, people with disabilities, minority communities and more. And defines the aspirational targets wherever feasible. Nom com should also ensure that the diverse candidates have the required skill sets.

Open questions

The document was discussed in Oct 1, 2020 AB con call. The open questions at the current state of the document are as follows.

• There is overall concern over and objection to having specific targets for different diversities in the document.
• There is specific disagreement on the goals of geographic diversities: The current parameters are based on population, but the W3C Membership is heavily weighted in a different way (for example, the current suggestion recommends three times as many representatives from Asia as North America, but the current membership has roughly two and a half times as many members from North America as from Asia.) The core question is whether we are attempting to use these guidelines to fix the issue of concentration of membership in a few countries.
• There was a suggestion that we should increase specific targets: e.g., Increase aspirational target for women from 40% to 50%, and for people with disabilities from 15% to 20%.
• There is some concern over a lack of emphasis on inclusion of black community, and explore adding some aspirational targets. Currently it is included in ethnic minorities. The challenge is that the term “black lives” is good for slogans because it identifies with many communities. But what is the way to specifically define “black”, it is comparatively easy to identify in united States because most of the black are American Africans but it is a challenge to define from global perspective for example under colonialism natives of many countries across the world were considered as black.
• There is an identification challenge for diversities like LGBTQI+.
• There was some concern over using term "minorities".