Re: publish which list of nominees?

[Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 11:48:50AM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
> Having never been on a nomcom, this is just idle speculation,
> but I would assume that, even with reasonable candidates in
> front of it, a nomcom might well do a certain amount of
> "headhunting" out of ordinary due dilligence.  As just a
> superficial example, I have been asked in interviews (although
> not, if I recall, this year) to identify the person who I
> thought would be the absolutely best for a particular position
> if he or she could be talked into it (without disclosing whether
> the nomcom was already looking at that individual).  Similarly,
> I've been asked if I could identify the most likely
> up-and-coming people in a particular area for future
> consideration.
> 
> If a nomcom chooses to ask those sorts of questions, and a few
> names come up many times, I would expect the nomcom to try to
> recruit those people onto the list of people to be considered,
> even if they had not been formally/externally suggested as
> candidates and even if the pool already included people who
> seemed to be satisfactory.
> 
> If that reasoning is correct, the late addition of a name to the
> list does not imply anything at all about presumed deficiencies
> in the people added to the list earlier.

All very true, although this tends to happen much earlier in the
process.  It doesn't tend to happen very late in the process; so if
new names were to appear on the list in late January or early
February, that would leak a certain amount of information about the
process.  I personally believe that the benefits make this tradeoff
worthwhile, but I do have to acknowledge his downside does exist.
(But it can mean many things, and not just that the nomcom has
negative evaluations of all of the people under consideraton.)

						- Ted