Hi Lakshminath,
Good point. Its possible that you would get (some) more input with
the new system. My guess is though that you'd still need to poll specific
groups to get the input, because people are typically not very
eager to do things unless you remind them. But its likely that
if you get very extreme candidates (particularly bad ones), you
might get a lot of input on that particular person.
The main result, I think, would be that you would get more balanced
input, and from a wider set of people.
Anyway, your description below tells another story as well.
We've been basically asking in this thread whether confidentiality
is important or not. Its important to realize that there is no
"nomcom only" confidentiality. What we have is a situation where
not only the nomcom, but a fairly large group of people in the
area know, and a many "insiders" (e.g., people who know a lot of
potential candidates) know. We might wonder how useful this
confidentiality is for the candidates who, for some reason, wish
to have confidentiality. Many key people that you'd be working
with know that you were running.
Please note that I'm not critizing your input collection system.
You definately need the input! But in reality, the confidentiality
may not be quite as tight as one might believe. Plus I at least
prefer the IETF to operate in an open, transparent manner.
And I want to all the participants to have the same capability to
provide input. Of course, its still the nomcom that is in charge of
the selections -- this leaves you still the possibility to decide for
yourselves, favor input from someone (e.g. outgoing AD) more
than Joe Random Neverbeentoietf. So I'd say we don't have a
problem with electioneering, nor does this proposal turn the
IETF to a voting organization.
--Jari
In the current Nomcom, a few of us compiled lists of all WG
contributors (chairs, advisers, current I-D editors and authors)
within each area; and our Nomcom chair used a script to randomly
select a subset from those lists, and then used a 2-step process to
seek feedback. The first was to ask each potential feedback provider
whether he/she would agree to keep the list of candidates
confidential, and the second to ask for feedback, with the option of
providing it anonymously.
Sure the above process could be tweaked, but as it is does not result
in Nomcoms going "only to IETF management people" for feedback. Does
it possibly exclude folks who are enthusiastic about providing
feedback? Yes, but I think overall, it is quite fair.
I do think sending the candidate lists to ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org for feedback
has the downside potential of everyone commenting on a few of the
candidates or lists (i.e., areas). That, if/when happens, is
practically useless for 2 reasons: Nomcom doesn't get feedback on all
lists, and a huge amount of feedback might be impossible to parse and
compile for humans :-).
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