Re: CONSENSUS: should there be term limits?

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

My thinking is that we do probably need to add some guidance text while
leaving the current text unchanged. A strawman that says what I feel:

  Guidelines on turnover: While rigidly defined term limits would have
  the undesirable consequence of ejecting incumbents even when no
  superior candidate was available, it is in the interest of the
  IETF to have a balance between turnover and continuity in both the 
  IAB and the IESG. The nominating committee should strive to achieve
  such a balance rather than emphasising either turnover or continuity.

Comment: yes this leaves things up to the judgement of NomCom. I think
that's the right thing to do.

   Brian

Theodore Tso wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 09:30:00AM -0800, Randy Bush wrote:
> >
> > from 2727 2(1)
> >
> >    (1)  The principal functions of the nominating committee are to
> >         review the open IESG and IAB positions and to either nominate
> >         its incumbent or recruit a superior candidate.
> >                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Ah, but what does a "superior candidate" **mean**?  I am sure we could
> find some person who believes that after eight years, anybody,
> including a Siberian Husky, might be considered a "superior
> candidate".
> 
> You're confident you know what a "superior candidate" means.  Sure.
> But does your definition match up with other people?  This is why I
> believe having some rough guidelines which represent the sense of the
> community is a good thing.  Of course, nomcom will can always ignore
> these guidelines, and there will always be situations which we can't
> plan for.  So ultimately, we have to trust in the good faith and wise
> judgement of the voting nomcom members.
> 
> That being said, I strongly believe that having an public discussion
> about criteria which is open to the entire community about criteria is
> better than having a closed discussion amongst a subset of a
> self-selected sample of the community.  Maybe we need to have a public
> discussion over the criteria that we should use to select our leaders
> more often --- say, every three years or so; if so, maybe that should
> be in the process.
> 
> Going back to the original topic, though, if the sense of the
> community is that tradeoffs surrounding term limits are a bad thing,
> then let's say so, explicitly.
> 
>                                         - Ted
> 
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-- 
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Brian E Carpenter 
Distinguished Engineer, Internet Standards & Technology, IBM 
On assignment at the IBM Zurich Laboratory, Switzerland
Board Chairman, Internet Society http://www.isoc.org
INET 2002, Washington, DC, 18-21 June http://www.inet2002.org