Re: criteria for nomcom participation

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

--On søndag, januar 05, 2003 08:16:10 -0800 Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net> 
wrote:

> Dave,
>
> Sunday, January 5, 2003, 6:28:31 AM, you wrote:
> Harald> 1) do you have a specific suggestion, or are you just theorizing
> about the Harald> boundaries of the problem space?
>
> Sorry. I thought my note was rather explicit about making a suggestion.
> Please tell me in what way:
>
> Dave> If we want to ensure that nomcom has participation by people who
> know about Dave> IETF processes, then we need to ensure that it has
> participation by people Dave> who have been directly involved in the
> administrative process. That means Dave> chairs, editors, (former) ADs
> and (former) IAB members.
> Dave>
> Dave> Such a pool of potential participaants is too small -- and too
> select -- to Dave> be adequate for the entire membership of nomcom. That
> is the reason for Dave> suggesting filling some nomcom slots -- choose a
> percentage: 25%, 33%, 40%, Dave> 50%? -- from a pool of those who have
> held formal positions and another pool Dave> of those who have a recent
> attendance record, to fill the remaining nomcom Dave> slots.
>
> is not clear as a suggestion.

well... you have a range of alternative percentages, and a range of people, 
some of which may not be entirely clear; how do you determine who has been 
editors? those who have their names end up on the front page of an RFC, 
those who have held the pen at some point according to the working group 
chairs, or some other criterion?
do you envision a time limit to the IAB/IESG criterion, or does Russ Hobby 
(Applications AD in 1988) still qualify under this criterion?
(no idea what he does now - simply the oldest AD I could find...)

since we are now 6 months after the charter milestone for submission to the 
IESG of the finished document, and appear to have rough consensus on most 
of the rest of the document, it would seem like a good idea to make a 
*specific* suggestion (as in "put the following text in section 4 bullet 
15").

> Harald> 2) the rough consensus so far seems to be that the criterion we
> want is  Harald> knowledge of the IETF process, and that attending
> meetings is the criterion  Harald> that we've found that is easy to
> manage and may have some correlation.
>
> "may have some correlation" is an accurate assessment -- and by the way,
> does not contradict:
>
> Dave> The problem with a criterion of meeting attendance is that it has a
> weak Dave> correlation with knowing anything about the job of managing
> the IETF.
>
> In point of fact, the working group discussion has not made much of an
> effort to reconcile the clear and serious disparity between the nature of
> the current criterion and its lack of strong correlation with the desired
> knowledge.

My impression of the working group discussion is that it has observed the 
quality of the correlation, and decided not to change it.

> > > Avri> John Klensin ...worried about the "don't volunteer" folk self
> > > Avri> selecting out in favor of the ax grinders.
>
> Harald> the purpose I saw in adding this to the oral tradition was to
> make it clear what kind of people we *want* on the nomcom
>
> I thought the purpose was to show the weakness in the underlying basis for
> the current criterion and the underlying weakness with trying to remedy
> that weakness by relying on self-selection.

as you say - those two sentences are not contradictory.