Hi Joel, At 07:39 27-05-2009, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
Having read the draft, it seems to me that this is a bad idea.
Maybe. :-)
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.
There is a notion of incumbents being "fired". That seems to be the problem when the incumbent is not selected for a new term.
What is the appropriate number of incumbents to be returned? How many is too many and how many is too few? By mentioning a number, we will create another "ringer" problem. I agree that there isn't a right number. Section 2 of the draft has a table with the percentage of incumbents returned. That provides us with a trend. Now, what do we do when we see a trend? We figure out whether there is a reason.
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.
I agree.
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.
Yes.
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
We have a problem here. If the goal is to appoint the best available person to the job, then returning too many should not be a consideration. Let's see what happens when you return too many. It may discourage people from running and it encourages a closed social network.
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.
If the IETF community doesn't ensure that there are enough good nominees, then it has the leadership it deserves. It has been pointed out (not in the draft) that in practice NomCom has ways to find nominees. Not filling in the seat has more to do with the relationship between NomCom and the appointing body.
It is perceived that not being selected for a new term means that the member has been fired as it is more sociably acceptable to do that instead of invoking the recall process. That perception could be tackled by eliminating the notion of incumbents. We can remove "running against" or "firing" from the discussion by doing away with consecutive terms. The draft mentions that retirement after a single term is uneconomic for the community. That obvious fix is to have longer terms but then we may have to invoke the recall process. As it will likely be seen as too controversial to use that process, we'll end up in the same situation as now. Feel free to beat the idea around and point out why it's a bad one.
Regards, -sm
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