What I was trying to say in the plenary last week

[Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com>]

In practice, the confirming body for a slate is highly unlikely to ever
use its right to reject a candidate. The reason is that if the confirming
body has serious doubts about a candidate, what will in general happen is:

1. It will ask the NomCom pointed questions along the lines of: has the
NomCom consulted all the people necessary, and has the NomCom considered
various specific factors?

2. The NomCom will either immediately, or after additional work, respond
that it has done so, rediscussed the choice, and confirmed the candidate.

3. At that point, the confirming body must conclude that the NomCom has
followed adequate process and the only interpretation of rejecting
the candidate is that the NomCom's collective judgement is wrong.

3a. The timing is such that this would occur approximately 2 weeks
before the March IETF, i.e. far too late for a serious search for
a new candidate (unless the NomCom already had anticipated this result,
which seems unlikely).

4. The consequences of this would be that by rejecting the candidate,
the confirming body would be essentially overriding the pseudo-democratic 
process at the heart of the NomCom procedures and denying the legitimacy 
of NomCom's right to choose.

5. In practice, in my experience in the IAB and the ISOC Board, 
this means that however doubtful the confirming body may be about 
a particular appointment (or non-renewal), it never says "no" for 
fear of creating a consitutional crisis. [This does not refer to
any year in particular; I remember several instances.]

Thus, the "reject" button in RFC 2727 has always been interpreted
as the "nuclear option", i.e. the button you would press only in order
to destroy the whole process.

My conclusion is paradoxically that we do need to retain this option,
but we should change the rest of the process in such a way that it
is much less likely than today that the confirming body will be put
into the dilemma described above. A number of changes could be made,
but the most important one that I would support is: publish the
list of nominees that the NomCom is considering seriously, so that
the entire community has the chance to comment (confidentially).
This will have some unpleasant side-effects (more mail for NomCom to
read, and no doubt some ad hominem attacks) but I think it will
increase transparency to the point where lack of confidence in
NomCom's judgement is much less likely.

---

Truth in advertising: I have been a member of one confirming body (the IAB)
for the last 8 years, and stepped down voluntarily this year. I am still
a member of the other confirming body (the ISOC Board). There is nothing
in the current rules preventing an individual from being a member of
both confirming bodies, but the practice is for an ISOC Trustee to recuse
him/herself when directly concerned by the IAB slate.

   Brian