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

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com>]

Brian and all,

  I must agree with Biran's conclusion here.  However the process
is still so flawed irrespective of this concern as to be a rigged game in and
of itself...

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> 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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> --
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> Brian E Carpenter
> Distinguished Engineer, Internet Standards & Technology, IBM
> On assignment at the IBM Zurich Laboratory, Switzerland
>
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Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
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