Having read the draft, it seems to me that this is a bad idea.Firstly, I am not sure what problem it solves. There is apparently some concern about whether the nomcom is returning too many or too few incumbents. It seems likely to me that real world variation means that there is no right number. At a guess, given what the community has said, I would personnaly expect to see about half returned each time. And if I look at the numbers in the table, 49/95 have been returned. Whatever problems there may be in this dimension, they seem to be self-correcting and self-balancing.
At the same time, this proposal seems to actually make it harder for the nomcom to do a good job. The goal is to appoint the best available person to the job. Choosing to re-appoint or not re-appoint an incumbent without comparison with considering who else may be available and qualified is not, it seems to me, able to meet that goal.
It seems to me that the general notion of how many incumbents ought to be returned in any given cycle depends heavily on how many good alternatives there are. So I would hate to require the committee to make that decision without having that information.
More important than the abstract failure mode, there are multiple specific failure modes that would do a disservice to the community and the nomcom. If the nomcom has many qualified incumbents, if doing a stand-alone evaluation it may choose to return rather more incumbents than it would if it knew that some of those seats had good nominees available. Similarly, if the nomcom wishes to choose among the incumbents, because it feels that the good ones would still represent returning too many, the nomcom really needs to know who else is available. Conversely, it is quite possible that the nomcom would, in a stand-alone evaluation, decide that some incumbent was not quite as good as they would like, and choose not to appoint him. Only to discover that said incumbent is significantly better than any of the nominees they evaluate.
The document seems to suggest that the answer to some of these issues is to assume that there are always enough good nominees, and that if there are not, maybe the seat should go unfilled. This is sufficiently far from my understanding of the realities that it seems a dangerous assumption.
There is another dimension in which I have serious concerns with this proposal. One of the things the nomcom evaluates, for all bodies, is the balance of members. That balance may, in different years, be reflective of different aspects of skills, knowledge, contacts, etc... But That kind of balancing has been seen as important in may cases. Pre-selecting which incumbents will remain, and which will not, means that such balancing can not be used as part of the selection. This seems an extremely difficult and counter-productive restriction to place on the nomcom.
Also, it is my opinion that this would significantly increase the time for the selection process. The selection process is not linear. As such, while the number of seats to be filled has some effect on the time, it is not a significant factor. (Issues of collecting input, and whether particular choices are easy or hard, make more difference.) While this work could possibly be overlapped with some portion of the nomination selection, it clearly would need to be completed, confirmed, and announced before nominations were considered usable, since nominations would clearly need these results if this process were to take place. As such, I believe it would add several months to the process.
It is also the case that the differences in kinds of seats makes some difference. Even if it were somehow concluded that this made sense for the IESG, I can not see why one would apply it to the IAB. In the case of the IAB, one is not nominated against any one individual, but rather nominated for a seat in a pool. As such, none of the arguments presented about the open nominee list seem to apply to the IAB. And even more than the IESG (where some balancing issues do apply) the community consensus has seemed to me quite clear that balance of various kinds are a set of very important factors in selecting IAB members.
In summary, these seems to me a process which would make the nomcom's work harder, would make the work take longer, and would likely reduce the quality of the result.
Yours, Joel M. Halpern John C Klensin wrote:
Hi. During the plenary in San Francisco, several people made the point that it is probably time to think carefully about the mechanisms of the Nomcom model, not just to try to do the smallincremental tuning discussed recently on this list.Spencer and I have been kicking around an idea for some years that addresses one of those key issues: the relationship between nominees would are incumbents in a given role and those who would be new to it. Those differences are particularly important because of the large number of incumbents Nomcoms end up returning to their positions and because issues about "running against" an incumbent are at the root of several of the objections to (or likely need for exceptions from) an open list of nominees. I've just queued a document, draft-klensin-nomcom-incumbents-first-00.txt, for posting that addresses that issue by proposing a significant change to Nomcom operations. We look forward to your comments. john _______________________________________________ ietf-nomcom mailing list ietf-nomcom at ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-nomcom
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