Re: Consolidating BCP 10 (Operation of the NomCom)

On 13 Sep 2014, at 02:51, Murray S. Kucherawy <superuser(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> 
wrote:

> Jari.
>
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 3:49 PM, Jari Arkko 
> <jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> wrote:
>
> Section 5.12 seems to have text that relates to pre-RFC5680 situation:
>
>    The consultations are permitted to include names of nominees, if all
>    parties to the consultation agree to observe the same confidentiality
>    rules as the nominating committee itself.
>
> Shouldn’t this be changed? Or am I missing something?
>
> As I read this, "consultations" refers to meetings between a NomCom member 
> and a community member that might have comments about specific candidates, 
> not a list or short list of eligible candidates.  Unless I've misunderstood 
> RFC5680, there's been no change to the confidentiality of those 
> conversations, so that paragraph stands correct as-is.
>
> What did you have in mind here?
Indeed, RFC 5680 changed only the list to be open, not the feedback that people 
send.

I guess I had some trouble understanding what the text specifically says. Your 
read of the meaning is fine, inline with RFC 5860 and exactly what should 
happen. 

But it was not so clear to me. The consultations might also refer to the 
general desired expertise question which text preceding this text talks about. 
In that case names of candidates shouldn’t even come to the picture. 

The way I read the paragraph is that it talks about what we used to do: send 
list of names to some selected set of community members, and get back feedback. 
 If this is the correct reading, then maybe the text should change. But perhaps 
my point is that the text can be read in different ways.

But maybe I’m the only one getting confused, and if so, that’s fine. I don’t 
know if we want to make any clarifications (even editorial) in this 
republication of the BCP, but if I were to write the text from scratch today, 
I’d say:

   The consultations are permitted to include names of nominees, if all
   parties to the consultation agree to observe the same confidentiality
   rules as the nominating committee itself, or the names are public as
   discussed in Section 3.6. Feedback on individual nominees should
   always be confidential.

Jari

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