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Re: Final Announcement of Qualified Volunteers

2013-07-09 18:43:46
Hi John,

Excuse me for replying to just part of your message below:

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:31 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> 
wrote:

...

(3) It is probably too late to even discuss it for this year
(see below) but it occurs to me that, if one wanted to minimize
the odds of organizations trying to game the nomcom selection
process, it would be rational to do a two step draw, first
randomly selecting two volunteers from any organization offering
more than two and then including only those two in the final
selection process.    On the other hand, that would give you
around 81 candidates for the final selection this year.  If

The current two nomcom member per sponsor limit is really pretty much
of an honor system by self declaration. The Nomcom chair has no need
to bindingly determine what affiliation every volunteer has. Only as
nomcom members are selected does the Nomcom chair have to even think
about this. I think that, as a result, there are probably at most a
handful of cases where the Nomcom chair has to worry about this at all
including ambiguous cases such as someone working for a subsidiary of
a company that sponsors someone already selected for noncom or
consultations that nominally work for a separate organization but are
X% funded for their IETF work by BigCompany for various values of X.
Any "two step" rule as you suggest will move affiliation from a tail
end check designed to be sure that the nomcom passes the smell test to
the heart of the selection process. I think the result would be a
mess.

However, if such a system were adopted, its not like an upfront
selection to 2 per sponsor is the only alternative to the current
unlimited pool from which the noncom is selected. Just to give an
example of an alternative rule, since you have to classify all
volunteers as to who their sponsor is, you could do initially a select
among the V volunteers from sponsor S limited to the square root of V
rounded up. That would seem like a more moderate intermediate course.

running the final selection against order 140 people rather than
order 81 causes the community to believe that it has a better
sample, then that option probably would not be appropriate.  I
am not, however, convinced that we would actually have consensus
for minimizing those odds, nor about whether a company's ability
to nearly guarantee that at least one of its employees will be
on the Nomcom by providing a large fraction of the volunteers
violates the provision of Section 4, bullet 16, of RFC 3777
requiring "...unbiased if no one can influence its outcome in
favor of a specific outcome".

In my opinion, those words, in the context of the previous sentence
which speaks of each volunteer being equally likely to be selected,
means influence in favor of a particular volunteer or the like.
(Although all volunteers are equally likely to be selected, the
selections are ordered and after two have been selected with the same
affiliate, subsequent selections with the same affiliation are
discarded and additional selection(s) made.)

...

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA
 d3e3e3(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com

best,
   john