Re: PROPOSED GUIDELINE: balance

[Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU>]

    Date:        Wed, 03 Apr 2002 12:54:47 -0500 (EST)
    From:        Russ White <ruwhite@cisco.com>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.21.0204031254070.7633-100000@ruwhite-u10.cisco.com>

  | For the IAB they would have been. Should the nomcom look or
[...]

One think that should be made clear is that the nomcom can ask
questions (especially where they don't involve specific nominees)
of anyone they like.

If the nomcom had a question about what the makeup of the IAB should
be, they could ask the IAB, the IESG, the ISOC, or the whole IETF
(via the list, or if the question arose before the December IETF
meeting, at the plenary).

I thought this was already fairly clear, but if more words need to be
added to say that, then I suspect that can be done easily enough.

That is, the nomcom isn't required to simply take the instruction they're
issued at the start of the process ("fill these slots ...") and work
on that with no further input from the community (other than whether
some individual is good or bad for some job).

I'm not sure that embedding any particular guidelines in the nomcom doc
is a good thing - the desirable attributes tend to change over time,
which is very easy to handle in e-mail to the nomcom but much harder if
there is some suggestion buried in an RFC.   If the nomcom was faced
with choosing either someone who provided an attribute suggested by
the nomcom RFC, or choosing one who satisfied some requirement communicated
to it by the current IAB, but couldn't satisfy both, which should it
prefer?    My guess is that the RFC being the "will of the IETF" would
win, it would have to - but that's almost certainly not the best outcome.

kre