A proposal for publishing nominee names

[Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

This is being offered as a strawman concrete proposal on the issue of 
publishing a list of nominees or candidates from the nomcom deliberations.
It is not the position of anyone but myself at this point.

The mailing list has gone around and around on this issue, with the latest 
round ending with me making roughly the same proposal, and no rough 
consensus for making the change apparent.

I'd like to verify the consensus for *or* against this proposal in 
Yokohama; if there is no strong support, I'm happy to see the topic 
disappear.

                               Harald

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I suggest the following bullet to be inserted into 
draft-ietf-nomcom-rfc2727bis-01.txt, between bullets 8 and 9 of section 5:

 8. The names of all nominees that are suggested to the nomcom, and the
    positions for which they are nominated, are made
    public through a mechanism of the nomcom's choice.
    The list may include an indication that a nominee has asked not to be
    considered for a particular position.
    The list will be updated as more nominations come to the nomcom,
    on approximately a weekly basis.

The later paragraphs should be renumbered accordingly.

The following should be added to the oral tradition (Appendix A):


  Experience has shown that the nomcom process will usually reveal to a
  lot of people what nominees are being considered.
  It has also shown that some people will invariably comment that they
  did not know a person was a candidate, and therefore did not say anything
  to the nomcom of this particular person.
  In order to maximize relevant feedback to the nomcom, the names of
  nominees are made public.

  On the other hand, experience has shown that the process of getting to
  the right candidate can be complex and involve confidential information.
  In order to not reveal the evaluations of the nomcom, what is published
  should be a function of information generated outside the nomcom.
  An unedited list of names that have been nominated seems like a good
  choice.

  When a name occurs to the nomcom, it is probably conductive to
  calm deliberation to wait at least a week before making a final
  decision to nominate that candidate; having the name be public for
  a week before forwarding to confirming bodies should therefore not
  delay the process significantly.

Rationale for some items that may not be obvious:

One could have removed names from the list that are clearly not worth 
considering.
In some cases this is simple; in other cases it will not be.
Deciding which names to remove would reveal the Nomcom's thought process.

One could have removed names from the list if they asked not to be 
considered.
This might lead to the same person being renominated many times, which is 
useless.
Keeping the name on the list with a marker shows the community that if they 
want this person in that role, they will have to convince the person before 
spending time on convincing the nomcom to consider him.

One could have included the name of the nominator as well as the nominee; 
however, that would be noninformative in the case of a popular person 
nominated by many.
If publishing all the nominations, the nomination process runs the risk of 
mimicking a "popularity contest".

The proposal makes no difference between nominations generated by nomcom 
and nominations generated externally. That is intentional.