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Re: NOMCOM term limits... Re: Now there seems to be lackof communicaiton here...

2006-09-05 11:58:54
This is flat-out incorrect. The NomCom was created 
*precisely* to bring accountability to I* management 
positions, in the wake of the IAB's problematic actions at 
the time of the CLNP recommendation.

I think you are being naïve here.

If you want accountability you have elections. You introduce a nominating 
committee or an electoral college precisely to weaken accountability and 
maintain power in the 'right' hands.

Not when the nominating committee is randomly chosen.

It's true that NOMCOM isn't accountable to anybody, in the sense that
it can be punished for wrongdoing.  But it is responsible to the
community.  Accountability and responsibility are different things. 

"As indicated above, there was a strong feeling in the community that
   the IAB and IESG members should be selected with the consensus of the
   community.  A natural mechanism for doing this is through formal
   voting.  However, a formal voting process requires formal delineation
   of who's enfranchised.  One of the strengths of the IETF is there
   isn't any formal membership requirement, nor is there a tradition of
   decision through  votes. "

The conclusion is clearly based on a false premise. The criteria for 
qualifying for NOMCON membership are now well established and the NOMCON 
qualification criteria are clearly a sufficient basis for the franchise.

Only if you buy into another false premise - which is that democratic
voting produces responsible leadership.

On the contrary, the current situation provides me with a rather extensive 
ability to influence the results should I choose to. The NOMCON mechanism is 
considerably more open to organization by someone with political experience.

Heaven forbid that the people who choose I* actually get to know the
candidates and get input from people with experience dealing with them
directly.

Consider the following situation, imagine that there is a vacancy for a 
security area director, consider further that I wish for nefarious reasons to 
secure the nomination of a particular candidate which left to its own devices 
the NOMCON would be unlikely to choose. The first step in such a campaign 
would be to draw up a matrix of the members of the NOMCON, the people who 
they are most likely to respond to etc. It is unlikely that I need more than 
four people prominent in the Security world to make a concerted 
recommendation in favor of my candidate. I could do this without speaking to 
any member of the NOMCON myself.

You seem to believe that there's something inherently wrong with that.
If this brings the NOMCOM's attention to a good candidate, what's the
problem?  And if it brings NOMCOM's attention to a poor candidate, how
does it keep them from finding that out?

If you were a member of the NOMCON trying to fill a hard to fill post such as 
Security or Routing and you had a series of people prominent in the area come 
to you recommending a particular candidate the chances are that you would 
follow the recommendation.

No, the chances are that I would take a serious look at the candidate.
that's an important distinction.

The point here is that none of this is 'wrong' or 'outside the rules'. 

Nor is there anything obviously wrong with it.

Yes, that explains why IPv6 deployment has been so swift.

IPv6 deployment has been as slow as it has been because the IAB has been 
doing the wrong job. 

IPv6 deployment has been "slow" for lots of reasons, not the least of
which is that there's generally been a naive view of the path that IPv6
deployment would take, leading to unrealistic expectations about
timeframes and how to measure progress.

(though I certainly believe that more architectural input is needed
into IETF processes, and more attention needs to be paid to marketing.
hard to do without a budget, though.)

Keith

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