Re: What I was trying to say in the plenary last week

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 11:52:39AM +1100, Geoff Huston wrote:
> My concern is, however, outside of that perspective, and I am asserting 
> that there are many aspects to weakening of confidentiality, and one of 
> them is the ability to have such a process of nominee publication be 
> subverted by deliberate campaigning by nominees. I have seen, as many 
> Nomcom participants have been aware of, campaigning in the past, but these 
> exercises have been relatively low key because, as far as I can tell, 
> without any explicit confirmation that the nominee is on any short list, 
> the campaigning exercise rapidly loses momentum. But if you provide that 
> essential feedback, and you reinforce it with repeated iterations of short 
> lists where some nominees are re-listed, then you are providing a degree of 
> feedback that makes deliberate attempts to influence the nomcom through 
> organized campaigning not only possible, but, I'm afraid, highly likely.

I agree that publishing and republishing all of the short lists would
be a bad idea, and I'm not suggesting that.

My suggestion would be to make public all people who have agreed to be
considered by nomcom.  If nomcom chooses to arm-twist someone new
later in the process, should that person's name be revealed once he
agrees to be considered?  Maybe.  I agree that's a hard problem, since
that inherently is leaking information about how the process is
proceeding.

I'm not so much worried about the possibility of campaigning by
nominees, since nomcom already has to filter such things from its
input.  That's also why I'm not particularly concerned about it
becoming a popularity contest, since just as the IESG could easily
discern what happened Berstein had rallied several thousand Taiwaneese
people send "please reject IDN", with no technical content, I am
fairly confident that future nomcoms will have no problem identifying
content-free "campaigning" messages.  And, if the message contains
actual content about whether or not someone is competent, they can
judge that content, just as they judge that content today.

(Indeed, the real way the nomcom can be manipulated is not by
"campaigning"; that just produces a denial of service attack on the
nomcom.  The real way that you can manipulate the nomcom is by making
having several different people submit inaccurate information to
nomcom, and nomcom doesn't catch on.  So if for example, you observe
that the nomcom has no applications-saavy people on it, a conspiracy
of applications folks could each send consistent messages defaming a
particular candidate, and if it were done well, there's a very good
chance nomcom might not catch on.  After all, the same thing is coming
from multiple people, and since the contents of the notes are
privileged, checking that information with someone else is difficult
at best.  Unfortunately, the only way of fixing this particular
lossage mode would be to make all of the comments public, and that
probably *is* a cure worse than the disease.)

The one argument I've heard against making the candidates name public
which I consider to be a very good one, is that it might deter
potential candidates from being willing to put their names into the
hat.  For example, if the incumbent is popular, someone might not be
willing to have it publically know that he/she was willing to be
considered as an alternative to the incumbent.  That's a valid
concern, and I'm not sure how to address it.  One might be simply to
treat this as an educational problem --- if we point out that in a
healthy organization, there should always be succession planning going
on, and that putting ones name into the hat just so that nomcom can
gather more information just in case a replacement is needed on very
short notice is a good and useful thing to do.  There may be other
ways of addressing this particular short-coming, or we might decide
that the advantages of openness outweigh this particular downside.
But it is something we should consider.

							- Ted