Re: guidance on avoiding too many people from one company/group

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

All too complicated. The simple proposal we got to last time
around was:

-each volunteer is required to state, when volunteering, who
 his or her principal employer is;
-when making the random selection, as soon as two people stating
 the same principal employer have been picked, all others with
 that principal employer are removed from the pool.

In other words don't require judgement by the IETF about who 
the employer is, and don't waste cycles on corner cases such as
subsidiaries or changes of employer. Let's just do something simple 
and algorithmic, to avoid major gaming of the process.

   Brian

Eric Rescorla wrote:
> 
> Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net> writes:
> > Unfortunately the selection process must rely on a rather small
> > "population", namely folks who self-select to offer to participate. (The
> > pool of candidate nomcom participants is inherently biased, because it is
> > self-selected and because even as many as 100 volunteers makes for
> > statistically problematic pool.) So it is not suprising that -- as we have
> > seen -- the resulting group of nomcom participants is not random enough to
> > ensure community comfort.
> Dave,
> 
> As you know, it's very hard to draw these sorts of line and I think
> that all of these lines are very blurry.  For example:
> 
> (1) I spent a year as a contractor working essentially for Nokia,
> despite the fact that I was never an employee. Do I count as
> working for Nokia?
> 
> (2) Charlie Kaufman works for Iris which is wholly owned by IBM.  For
> years, his e-mail was Charlie.kaufman@iris.com and he had Iris
> Associates on his business card. Does Charlie Kaufman work for Iris or
> IBM? This month IBM shut down iris.com e-mail addresses. Who does
> Charlie work for now?
> 
> (3) Harald Alvestrand is a European working for an American
> company. Next year he will be based in the US. Is he American or
> European?
> 
> (4) I've got a friend who was born in India and is obviously
> ethnically Indian but is a naturalized US citizen. Is he American
> or Indian?
> 
> I've got a counter suggestion that doesn't require creating quite so
> many quotas and drawing bright lines. As I see it, the problem is
> primarily the small self-selected sample (as you mention
> above). Obviously, any non-random sample won't represent the main
> population as well as the population itself.
> 
> We'd like to completely remove the element of self-selection as the
> state tries to do with jury duty. Since we can't force people to
> serve, we can't eliminate it completely. However, we can substantially
> reduce it.  The simple fix is to randomly select nomcom members from
> the eligible pool. We don't require people to serve but
> psychologically people are much more likely to serve when specifically
> selected than if asked en masse to volunteer.
> 
> If there's some desire to favor volunteers we could draw part of
> the nomcom from a volunteer pool as well, as you suggest.
> 
> -Ekr
> 
> --
> [Eric Rescorla                                   ekr@rtfm.com]
>                 http://www.rtfm.com/
> 
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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