Re: PROPOSED GUIDELINE: balance

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

Robert Elz wrote:
> 
>     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.

Which is why any guidelines need to governed by a disclaimer, stating that
they are only guidelines and not binding rules.

   Brian