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Re: On Nov 5, 2006, at 6:59 PM, Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:

2006-11-06 23:55:20
I think I agree with most of what you say: what goes into the nomcom shouldn't come back out unless it is contained in a formal announcement specified in the RFC as the intended result of the process. Every year we have rumors floating around and concerns about those rumors. I have to say that on nomcoms I have served on, the rumor mill has had well less than 50% accuracy. I tend to think a lot of it is just that - people reading tea leaves in the eyes of people they know well, and sometimes guessing right. As near as I have been able to tell, information that goes into the nomcom does in fact stay there.

But that isn't what Lakshminath said. What he said was that the information should be confidential to the voting members of the nomcom, and he mentioned the liaisons as not being voting members. As one of the liaisons to the nomcom this year, having been a liaison to the nomcom in the past, and having chaired a nomcom, I think I am in a position to say that the implications of his statement are simply unworkable.

On Nov 6, 2006, at 2:39 PM, Sam Weiler wrote:

On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Fred Baker wrote:

On Nov 5, 2006, at 6:59 PM, Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:
Frankly the feedback does not need to seen by anyone other than the voting members IMO. What do others think?

So your point is that the chair of the nominating committee should not know who the candidates are?

I think Lakshminath was NOT referring to the list of candidates (which is confidential, but historically has been shared with a fairly broad list of people) and feedback on the candidates offered by others in the community (whether solicited or not), which is currently considered confidential. It would be silly to try to keep the chair from knowing the names of the candidates.

But as for the feedback:

As a NomCom member, I found the community feedback very valuable, and I strongly suspect that we would have gotten less rich feedback had we not promised to keep that feedback confidential. While I can imagine situations where the voting NomCom members, or even a subset of them, might want to keep particular feedback to themselves, I don't see a need to formally restrict the set of people who generally see the feedback. The chair and liasons, in particular, probably need to see that feedback in order to participate fully, as 3777 says they may.

As for other matters:

I would like to see the list of nominations kept confidential for much the same reasons as keeping the feedback confidential -- it will encourage more input.

As for the list of candidates, one of two things should happen: either make it public (my preferred choice, since it will encourage richer feedback) or do more to keep it confidential. If it's going to be confidential, NomCom needs to be more active about making the "short list" a bit "noisier", perhaps by including far more bogus candidates (credible ones, perhaps drawn from those who declined nominattions) and, to the extent the NomCom can easily present different "short lists" to each individual asked for feedback, randomly dropping names from the "short list". In favor of continuing to keep the list confidential (again, NOT my preferred choice): doing so would give the NomCom more latitude to do something a bit outside the rules, like allowing late nominations and even selecting a candidate who wasn't on the public list, which it may well find to be a compelling choice.

-- Sam

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