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RE: Now there seems to be lack of communicaiton here...

2006-08-31 15:04:10
My concerns are pretty much the same as John's here except that I care less 
about the outcome of this round than the precedent that would be set. The 
statement 'this is not a precedent' does not make it any less of a precedent.

If you have a problem in a normal election process then a re-vote is usually 
the right course of action.

That is not the case for this particular process. The process depends entirely 
on there being no degree of freedom on the part of the RO.

I would like to see a process that specifies the exception process, and no 
recourse to the chair does not count. In particular the process only works if 
there is a period between the publication of the list and the random selection.

-----Original Message-----
From: John C Klensin [mailto:john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 4:54 PM
To: Brian E Carpenter
Cc: IETF-Discussion
Subject: Re: Now there seems to be lack of communicaiton here...



--On Thursday, 31 August, 2006 09:38 +0200 Brian E Carpenter 
<brc(_at_)zurich(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com> wrote:

Full disclosure: My personal opinion, which I *did* give to 
Lynn and 
Andrew when I became aware of this glitch, is that a reset 
is the only 
way to be certain that the selection process is unbiased.

Brian,

I don't know about others, but I'd like to hear a little more
about your reasoning (and Andrew's) about this.   It seems to me
that drawing a second sample would be unbiased if the 
decision to draw it were made before anyone knew the contents 
of the first sample.  But, as soon as someone looks at the 
first sample and then has discretion as to whether to say 
"never mind" and draw another one, there is bias in the 
statistical sense.  That bias may or may not be harmful, or 
have the appearance of being harmful, but it definitely 
removes the rigid randomization of a method that doesn't 
allow any latitude or individual choice in the selection of a 
candidate pool.

To illustrate this, suppose that one initially drew two 
membership pools from the list of volunteers.  Now examine 
the following cases:

      (i) Someone looks at the contents of both pools, decides
      which one is preferred, and picks that one.
      
      (ii) Someone decides to look at one of the two pools and
      then decide whether to accept it or to select the other
      pool.
      
      (iii) The second pool is drawn after some or all the
      members of the first pool are withdrawn from the initial
      volunteer list, with the mechanism for selecting those
      who are withdrawn being exogenous to the process and
      presumably deterministic.

There are rather complex, and quite intriguing, models in 
statistical decision theory for examining each of these types 
of cases.  But none of them involve "unbiased" with regard to 
the randomness of the selection process.

     john

p.s. I deliberately haven't looked at the volunteer lists to 
determine who the relevant IAB member was, making the comment 
I'm about to make unbiased by that knowledge.  But I believe 
that an IAB member who is sufficiently unfamiliar with our 
procedures to have volunteered to the nomcom should be 
seriously considering stepping down (which would not make him 
or her nomcom-eligible, of course).  I also believe that this 
micro-debacle suggests that future revisions of the nomcom 
selection document should be explicit about two cases:

(1) Sorting the nomcom volunteer pool into alphabetical order 
and then assigning numbers that will, in turn, be used in the 
determination of who gets selected is not appropriate.  The 
sequencing of the volunteer pool should probably use a 
randomization process that is demonstrably independent of the 
randomization process that selects nomcom members from that list.

(2) Just as the rules that link the date of resignation from 
a nomcom-selected position with rules about filling the 
resigned position (e.g., with regard to duration of terms) 
need clarification in some way that can be reviewed by the 
community via Last Call, we probably need absolute clarity 
about the relationship between the date of resignation and 
eligibility to serve on a Nomcom, initiate recalls, etc.





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