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

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

People in the IETF have always given their affiliation in IDs, RFCs, etc.

The argument that there are a few diffcult cases is an example of "the
fallacy of the beard". If someone has one hair on their chin, do they
have a beard? If someone with a beard plucks out one hair, do they still
have a bear? Continuing in this way, we can, in some sense, prove that
the concept of having a beard is meaningless. But people use the beard
concept every day and derive great utility from it.

The important thing is to have reasonably straight foward procedures
that are as transparent as they reasonably can be. Have the volunteers
list their affiliation. Include that in the posted list of volunteers
and in the list of those selected. And in each case be sure the list is
announced and available for some reasonable length of time until a fixed
deadline for any public comments. If questions arise before the
deadline, the nomcom chair decides. If questions arise after the
deadline, they are ignored. If nomcom members change affiliation after
selection, they remain nomcom members regardless.

I guess it can't hurt to tell someone they were skipped due to two
persons already having been chosen with their affiliation but they
should already have checked the affiliations in the volunteer list when
they were listed.

Thanks,
Donald

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Scott W Brim wrote:

> Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 10:07:12 -0500
> From: Scott W Brim <swb@employees.org>
> To: Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com>, EKR <ekr@rtfm.com>
> Cc: Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net>, avri doria <avri@sm.luth.se>,
>      ietf-nomcom <ietf-nomcom@lists.elistx.com>
> Subject: Re: guidance on avoiding too many people from one company/group
> 
> On Monday, November 11, 2002 8:23 AM -0500,
> Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com> allegedly 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.
> 
> Keep the algorithm simple by leaving the corner cases to the discretion
> of the NomCom chair, with accountability through sending a unicast
> message to anyone rejected by this method.  "We took you off the list
> because there were already two from X and your principal employer is a
> wholly owned subsidiary of X."
======================================================================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd                       dee3@torque.pothole.com
 155 Beaver Street              +1-508-634-2066(h) +1-508-851-8280(w)
 Milford, MA 01757 USA                   Donald.Eastlake@motorola.com