Re: Nomcom candidate name announcement alternatives

[Dave Crocker <dcrocker@brandenburg.com>]

At 03:54 PM 7/17/2002 +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Dave Crocker wrote:
> >...
> > However we need to deal with the realities of that diversity.  One of those
> > realities is that we now see more efforts and stronger efforts to
> > manipulate processes for purely political purposes and in highly political
> > fashion.
>
> No disagreement there. The question is whether the current "smoke filled
> room" approach, or an approach with all candidates known to the public,
> is less subject to manipulation.

I would guess that the current, private model makes manipulation by the 
nomcom easier and publishing can make manipulation by candidates easier.

I do suspect that there is general IETF discomfort about the closed nature 
of the nomcom and that, therefore, some sorts of increased disclosure might 
help dissipate that.

However my own experience is that the random selection mechanism for voting 
members and the participation by a large number of liaisons and other 
'adult supervision' folk makes me have a heck of a lot of faith in the 
nomcom and its deliberations.  As with my one experience on a criminal jury 
-- and, no, we were not the criminals -- deliberations were very, very 
deliberate.  Folks take their duty extremely seriously and work very hard 
to understand tradeoffs and likely effects.

For example the idea that one nomcom member can force a particular outcome 
is quite silly.  It presumes that the other (10?) voting members are sheep 
who are easily led.  I don't know about anyone else's experience but mine 
is that the IETF has remarkably few sheep.  Nomcom is a sampling of the 
general IETF,  Participants display a range of knowledge, insight, and the 
like.  However the one invariant is that pretty nearly all nomcom voting 
members are active, opiniated, assertive folk.  A member might put forward 
a strongly held point of view and might lobby for it vigorously, but 
ultimately they are only one vote.  And the other votes NEVER go along with 
any particular point of view easily or without independent consideration by 
each of those voters.

The problem is, how do we get all the folks who have not been inside a 
nomcom to acquire the faith that comes from having seen it in operation?

d/


----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.850.1850