"John" == John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> writes:
John> confidential or not) or getting into public discussions about
John> qualifications for a position while that position is under
John> active consideration by the Nomcom (not because the
John> qualifications should be an issue but because, once the
John> candidate list is known, comments about qualifications are
John> comments about candidates unless everyone is hyper-careful
John> about what they say, how they respond to what others say, and
John> what inferences they draw.
John, I agree with what you say and what Jari said--both the part you
quoted and the rest of his note. However, I think the part of your note
above is a bit unclear. I realize you and I have been having side
discussions about this issue for a few days now, but I suspect the IETf
list may not be able to follow what you wrote above, because I had
significantly difficulty the first time you explained it to me.
When you engage in a discussion of qualifications while there is an open
position, you very quickly force others to either abandon the discussion
or to make comments that expose information about how they feel about
candidates.
Let's take an example that happened here.
Joe Touch said something that roughly boiled down to he didn't want to
see an AD who required a tutorial in basic networking knowledge. I felt
that wasn't a useful place to take the discussion because I feel that
the candidates in question don't need such a tutorial.
I have a number of options:
1) I can say that. However, if someone out there does feel that we have
candidates who should be disqualified for this reason, they're now in a
really bad position. They either need to speak up and thus disclose
information about their evaluation of candidates or stay silent in which
case the discussion passes them by and pushes people out of the
discussion.
2) I could take a page from consensus-building techniques and say "Joe,
I'm confused; it's not obvious to me which candidates need such a
tutorial. Who are you thinking of?" That would actually be a great
approach to try and understand where Joe's coming from if there weren't
confidentiality involved. It's absolutely the wrong answer here because
it puts Joe in a really bad position.
3) I can ignore the discussion. However if a lot of people do this, we
end up focusing time in the discussion on issues that we don't have
community interest in, only because we're excluding a lot of community
members from expressing that.
Similar examples are easy to find.
my conclusion is that you basically cannot discuss requirements for an
open position while it's open and get meaningful results.
I look forward to the discussion of future years. I hope that who ever
is moderating that discussion is very careful to close down any attempts
to bring it to a discussion of this year or what this year's nomcom
should do. In my opinion, people who have opinions about that should contact
the
nomcom and iab (nomcom12(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org and iab(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org).