On 3/16/2013 3:54 PM, James Galvin wrote:
-- On March 13, 2013 10:45:11 AM -0800 Melinda Shore
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com
wrote regarding Re: Consensus on the
responsibility for qualifications? (Was: Re: Nomcom is responsible
for IESG qualifications) --
I think we need to acknowledge that the confirming body (IAB)
effectively has veto power over those criteria/requirements,
since it can reject candidates who were selected by evaluation
against those criteria.
I do not acknowledge this.
Currently, RFC 3777 is clear that the criteria/requirements are set by
the NOMCOM. Certainly we can discuss this and choose to change it
because we believe the process needs to evolve but that would be a
fundamental shift in how the process was designed to work.
Jim,
One of the challenges for a topic like this is to distinguish between
objective fact, personal preference, and rough consensus.
Oddly, the intent of RFC 3777's authors is not the controlling factor
here. We have the community's reading of the actual text and we have
many years of actual practice. Knowing what the authors had in mind can
be useful input, but it isn't controlling.
RFC 3777's statement concerning the nature and scope of the confirming
body's decision on whether to confirm is:
"The confirming bodies conduct their review using all
information and any means acceptable to them, including but not
limited to the supporting information provided by the
nominating committee, information known personally to members
of the confirming bodies and shared within the confirming body,
the results of interactions within the confirming bodies, and
the confirming bodies interpretation of what is in the best
interests of the IETF community."
In other words, there is nothing in 3777 that meaningfully restricts
what the confirming body can decide to use as its criteria. "using all
information and any means acceptable to them" is quite explicitly a
blank check.
And indeed, confirming bodies and nominating committees often have a
negotiation on this issue. The normal form is the debate between a
confirming body's merely assessing the nominating committees process,
versus conducting an entire reassessment of a candidate (thereby
second-guessing the work of the nominating committee...)
The fundamental principle on which RFC 3777 is based is that all
responsibility for the selection of the leadership and how that
leadership is comprised belongs to the community. The community selects
a set of representatives, the NOMCOM, to execute on that responsibility.
Strictly speaking, "the community" does not select Nomcom, given the
actual mechanisms used to populate it. The community authorized that
mechanism, but it looks like no other mechanism that the IETF uses that
would be called "community selection or community decision-making.
This means the NOMCOM sets the criteria/requirements.
What we've heard on this list over the last week (or was it longer?) is
that different Nomcom's had different interpretations of RFC 3777
concerning Nomcom's authority to set criteria/requirements.
My own reading of the postings is that there appears to be a reasonable
convergence on having Nomcom in fact set the criteria, which is why I'm
trying to formulate language to make this part of RFC 3777 sufficiently
clear that every Nomcom will see itself having the same authority every
year. (How it exercises that each year is an entirely different matter...)
It seems to me that the real question here is what is the role of the
confirming body? Should its role be biased towards a review (however
deep) of the work of the NOMCOM or should its role be biased towards
ensuring the NOMCOM has followed the process in selecting its slate of
candidates?
We're somewhere around 20 years of practice. The scope of confirming
body concern has remained a fluid issue.
But it also hasn't been one that's occupied folks much this week, that
I've seen.
So I disagree with Melinda that we need to discuss it now... Better to
focus on one issue at a time.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net