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

[Donald Eastlake 3rd <dee3@torque.pothole.com>]

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Dave Crocker wrote:

> Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 12:01:02 -0800
> From: Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net>
> To: Donald Eastlake 3rd <dee3@torque.pothole.com>
> Cc: ietf-nomcom <ietf-nomcom@lists.elistx.com>
> Subject: Re: guidance on avoiding too many people from one company/group
> 
> Donald,
> 
> Monday, November 11, 2002, 6:20:53 AM, you wrote:
> Donald> I think the main problem is the appearance of fairness.
> 
> Appearance of fairness is only one of two concerns. The other is the
> legitimate need for real diversity of perspectives. Too much "cultural"
> concentration works against this need.
> 
> No matter how well intentioned individuals are, we reflect the cultures we
> come from.  Companies are cultures.  So are some other associations.

I guess this may be getting a bit more true. But there have also been
nomcom members from large companies who used non-company mailboxes for
their nomcom correspondence because thy thought it likely their business
email address was about to be disabled due to their intransigent failure
to follow their employers policies (not that these policies had anything
to do with nomcom action, they were OS/email client policies). I find 
the people active in the IETF tend to be less like corporate advocates 
than, for example, people active in the IEEE or W3C.

> Real diversity ensures that a topic is considered from significantly
> different perspectives.  Nomcom deliberations absolutely rely on that
> diversity.

Of course all organizations are cultures and all people are members of
many cultures, etc. But the only perceived problem, the only thing these
is a consensus on, is to fix the
too-many-nomcom-members-from-the-same-organization problem. I am
satisfied that, with that fix, the present rules will provide adquate
diversity and apparently most other people are also.

> Donald> You are waving your hands vaguely when that isn't necessary.
> 
> FWIW I meant my comments about diversity to be neither hand-waving nor
> vague.  They pertain to a very basic construct in this sort of
> decision-making process.

I don't have a problem with statatements that diversity is important. I
don't have a problem with implementing the consensus and fixing the
too-many-nomcom-members-from-the-same-organization problem. I find it
pretty handwaving when you talk about country or maybe its geographic
region diversity and vaguely hint about there being lots of other kinds
of distasteful diversity that might be important, remarks that seem to
me designed to counger up racial, sexual orientation, vegitarian,
endian, and who knows what else kinds of diversity.

> Donald>  The IETF
> Donald> is, and is intended to be, a technocratic orgnaization.
> 
> Yes, but management is management, and that is a different from technology.
> Nomcom is about selecting managers. It therefore needs to pay a lot of
> attention to matters that are quite different from technical consideration.

But one thing nomcom doesn't need to pay a lot of attention to is
political considerations of nation states.

> Donald> This is
> Donald> the only problem I see, not some vague necessity to be abstractly
> Donald> diverse for all dimensions (an obvious impossibility).
> 
> Don, I think your reaction is probably representative of our community, but
> that is exactly the problem. Most of us are technicians (ie, non-managers).
> We are asking mostly non-managers to select mostly non-managers for doing
> very difficult management jobs.
>
> As a group we tend to be ignorant of the real skills that are needed to be a
> good AD. This is not a matter of intelligence or intent. It is a matter of
> skill.

It is obvious that you want radical changes in nomcom selection which
essentialy no one else on this list supports very much. I don't think it 
is going to happen this go around.

> Requiring that the nomcom be really and significantly diverse is not a
> matter of abstraction any more than worrying that the nomcom actually know
> something about IETF processes. Nomcoms must conduct difficult deliberations
> and pursue subtle trade-offs. It absolutely must have a diversity of
> perspectives to ensure that essential-but-not-obvious considerations are
> raised and that trade-offs are considered robustly.

As I say, I believe that the random selection process achieves adequate
diversity ovedr time. Fixing the
too-many-nomcom-members-from-the-same-organization problem is needed to
assure the appearance of fairness and will further improve diversity.

What you want is a quota of people with IETF management experience, a 
very different thing.

> >> 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.
> 
> Donald> When the nomcom member volunteer pool was around 40, as it was for the
> Donald> first several years, this problem didn't occur.
> 
> We had a far more homogeneous "population" then.

Not really. But with a smaller pool, there just weren't 4 people from
the same organization available to be picked.

> These sorts of sampling issues are bread and butter in social research
> methodology. And, yes, that is the skillset that applies to this discussion
> of nomcom selection. How to get a small group that represents a large group
> is about sampling methodology.

There is a spectrum of opinion here. There are those who think of the
nomcom members as having the job of simply absorbing and applying the
community input with minimum of self-originated judgement. Such people
want as huge a volunteer pool as possible and think its fine if 10
people are selected who are bascily just attendees and lurkers. Then
there are those like you who, it seems to me, are thinking that its very
heavily dependent on the judgement of the nomcom members, with some
feedback from the community, so it is absolutely vital that people with
a great depth of history and management experinece in the IETF are very
heavily represented on the nomcom. No previous debate on the nomcom has
ever resolved this or changed that many opinions, so we sort of proceed
down a middle course, which is probably the right thing.

> Donald> frankly, if three
> Donald> people from a company ended up on the nomcom but they were all well
> Donald> known, decades long participants in the IETF, it would not be much of a
> Donald> problem.
> 
> The challenge is in writing a reasonably objective rule that captures the
> problems but lets the acceptable cases slide.  And, by the way, how would
> you feel if EIGHT such people were selected, out of the 10 voting members?

You obviously need a bright line rule that clear and easy to apply, even
if it rules out some acceptable cases. Anything else imposes too much of
a burden on the administrators.

If 8 such people were selected, I would expect, because the probability
was so low, that the selection was fixed rather than random. And, if the
people were as described, I'd have reasonable confidence in the nomcom's
decisions. But I would feel that no one outside the IETF would believe
the process was fair or that the IETF hadn't been captured by the
organization in question.

> Donald>  It's when some company routinely sends 45 people to IETF
> Donald> meetings most of whom are relativley unknown to the community
> 
> I mostly agree.  That is why I am inclined to believe we should have two
> pools of volunteers.  One with the relatively lax criteria in place today,
> and one that is more stringent and requires a history of deeper involvement
> in the IETF.

Since you are repeating yourself, I'll repeat myself. It's too
complicated and if you did want to encourage certain objectively defined
characteristics, you can do so by biasing the selection procedure as I
described in my message.

> Donald>  and 15 of
> Donald> them volunteer and qualify for nomcom and 3+ of those are selected that
> Donald> its a problem.
> 
> >>     Company affiliation is the one that has surfaced. Are there others?
> 
> Donald> It's not "company", it's organization.
> 
> ok.
> 
> >> 2.  What can we do to make randomization better, in terms of the pool that
> >>     members are drawn from and in terms of the mechanism for drawing from
> >>     that pool?
> 
> Donald> The randomization, if you use something like RFC 2777, is about as
> Donald> random as you can get.
> 
> Alas, I was afraid that my use of the word randomization would cause a focus
> on the algorithm that is used now. However I meant the issue as a macro
> issue.
>
> It is really about the methodology of populating nomcom, rather than the
> particular algorithm for drawing from a particular pool. The current
> algorithm is fine. The problem is size and nature of the pool. The algorithm
> can do little about this.

No, with todays nomcom pools with heavy representation from a few
companies, the current algorithm has the
too-many-nomcom-members-from-the-same-organization problem. If you
assume a pool of 100 of which 30 are 10 each from 3 organizations, the
probability of 4 or more members being selected form one of these
organizations is about 5%. In otherwords, a more or less universally
recognization unacceptable situtation will occur 1 in 20 selections.
Thus the algorithm must be changed, for example by adding a rule
implementing a prohibition more than 2 members from one organization.

> >> 3.  What should be the hard limits, in case the randomization does not work?
> 
> Donald> Randomization works by being random.
> 
> Not if the pool is too small or otherwise distorted. Again, as I note, this
> is not rocket science. Nor is it math science. It is social science, and
> there is quite a lot of experience with this problem.

I see no reason to believe that the pool is too small. I think it is
plenty big.

> Donald> "IETF management experience" is a whole different matter we should not
> Donald> confuse with the issue at hand.
> 
> Huh? You mean you do not care how much knowledge about IETF management there
> is, among the voting members of the group charged with choosing IETF
> managers???

I appreciate you are trying to use the clear need to solve the
too-many-nomcom-members-from-the-same-organization problem as a hook to
once again propose management experience quotas, but there isn't any
consensus for that. And I won't even bother talking about the words you
are putting in my mouth.

I believe the current scheme provides adequate "knowledge about IETF
management" which, of course, is not the same thing as "experience as an 
IETF process manager".

> d/

Thanks,
Donald
======================================================================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd                       dee3@torque.pothole.com
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