Re: [ietf-nomcom] Confidentiality and information from former NomCom members

[John C Klensin <john-ietf at jck.com>]

--On Wednesday, June 03, 2009 15:26 -0500 Spencer Dawkins
<spencer at wonderhamster.org> wrote:

> Hi, John,
> 
> OK, I went back and looked at 3777, and I'm not feeling much
> better about this text.
>...

I trust it is obvious by now that, if we managed to have the
same quality of clear and unambiguous  writing, and coverage of
the necessary cases, in our protocol documents that we do in our
procedural one, either the Internet would have collapsed long
ago or the IETF would be irrelevant to it.  Of course, the
number of do-overs that have been required in the IPR space is
the poster child for this, but the Nomcom and related processes
are really not much better.   To make things worse, we are often
protected by the Robustness Principle where protocol documents
are concerned, but we don't have analogies and a consensus
understanding about how to apply them in these cases.

>...
> Let me begin by saying I agree with what YOUR note said
> ("general criteria, decision processes, and procedures").
> 
> I may be confused, but I could be convinced that 3777 uses the
> word "deliberations" to describe precisely what you're hoping
> would NOT be included. I'm looking at text like
> 
>    10. The Chair announces the open positions to be reviewed,
> the
>        desired expertise provided by the IETF Executive
> Director, and the call for nominees.

There are documents on this earth that, because of exception
care or divine guidance, have the property that every use of a
word has exactly the same meaning and that every change in
vocabulary means something.   For better or worse, IETF
procedural documents are not among them.  See above.

>...
> So, as a non-3777 wonk, I'm thinking that the text that Bernie
> was struggling with, could be improved. I don't think we need
> to wait for a fix to advance openlist, but I hope this does
> get fixed at some point.

Certainly it would be a good idea to do that.  It would be, IMO,
an even better idea to rewrite all of our procedural documents
from scratch, using an absolutely consistent style and examining
every sentence to be sure that it doesn't leave odd edge cases.

I would also like a pony.

    john