Should a CB approve a slate or individuals?

[Avri Doria <avri@acm.org>]

Michael StJohns wrote:

> At 05:05 PM 3/31/2003 -0500, Avri Doria wrote:
>
>> Re: the question of reviewing a slate as whole or as individual
>> candidates.
>>
>> While more often the case in selecting the IAB then IESG, though
>> it does occur in the IESG as well, a slate is often picked for its
>> balance of talents.  The recommendation of the DT is that a slate
>> is sent to the CB as a whole and must be accepted as a whole.  In
>> rejecting a slate, the CB is certainly encouraged to indicate what
>> parts of the slate it finds unacceptable, but the NomCom can
>> reconsider the entire slate and resubmit a slate with different
>> candidates, even if some of the replaced candidates were acceptable
>> to the CB during its prior review.  It is in keeping with this
>> recommendation for the NomCom to submit a slate to the CB that does
>> not fill all open roles.  In this case, the presented slate counts
>> as a unit and its approval is not affected by any later submissions.
>> To reiterate, a slate can only be accepted in its entirety, but t
>> here is no rule stating that a slate must fill every vacancy - a
>> slate is defined as being a single list of names and positions
>> presented to the CB for approval.
>> It is considered approved and unchangeable once the CB notifies the
>> NomCom that it has been accepted.
>
>
>
> No.  Just no.  Its unfair and unreasonable to expect the CB to be able
> to balance individuals against a complete slate.  The slate represents
> no more than 1/2 of the sitting members of the body being appointed, the
> change of one or two individuals based on a rejection should not be
> considered to cause that much perturbation.  In any event, any imbalance
> can be fixed in the following year.
>
> Confirmations are discussed and decided upon based on the qualifications
> of an individual, not on the ability of the slate as a whole to succeed
> or fail.   If I were managing the confirmation process for the IAB
> (fortunately, that's Leslie's job), I wouldn't know how to frame the
> question of whether to accept or reject a slate based on whether one or
> more individuals were bad enough to prevent us from accepting the rest.
> It may be possible to frame this for a single rejection, but you start
> getting interesting combinatorial problems when you start thinking about
> more than one unacceptable person.
>
> Please, leave this as a confirmation of individuals.  If an individual
> fails of confirmation, it shouldn't be that traumatic to suggest an
> alternative, even if the balance among the whole slate isn't exactly
> what the Nomcom hoped it would be.  Think of it this way: if changing 1
> or 2 fully qualified candidates (out of 12 or 18 total members) causes
> so much perturbation,  there's a lot more wrong than the Nomcom can
> actually fix.
>
> The suggestion that partial slates could go forward also fails.  It
> needlessly extends the process without actually adding to the quality of
> the result.
>


I am curious to hear some discussion of the list on this issue.
So far I think there have been only a few voices.  While I need
to review the list again, I think I have heard one voice for
voting as a slate and one against.

As for RFC2727, I think it was ambiguous on the notion of a slate
of candidates versus single candidates.


a.