--On Saturday, October 23, 2021 15:52 +0000 "Salz, Rich" <rsalz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > My proposal takes the hard decision-making out of Nomcom's > hands, and puts it into the IETF community. > > We've been saying it's everyone's job to find and groom > candidates. One way to think of my proposal is that it is a > forcing function for that. Rich, Absolutely, including the advantages of putting more responsibility and pressure on the community to find and groom candidates. That has considerable appeal to me. That is balanced or countered in my mind by two things: (1) I'm concerned about edge cases in which an extra (i.e., third) term would be in the interest of the incumbent and the community. If you allowed for an exception procedure --whether the exception were made my the Nomcom or some community action-- I'd be much more comfortable about it. It that exception procedure were hard to use... so much the better as long as it is plausible. (2) Overlapping the above, I've got a general distrust of trying to do things by rigid rules in the IETF. We've historically been much better off delegating responsibility and and authority to groups or clusters of people, letting them do their work, and then holding them accountable for it. The big problem with the Nomcom in that regard is that they do whatever they do, their internal discussions and the information they base them on are largely confidential, and there is no accountability mechanism. I don't have any idea how to "fix" that which isn't worse than the problem -- and making rigid rules may be in that category of fix. However, IMO, if we don't like giving guidance to the Nomcom and then letting them exercise discretion, we should probably be looking at how we select our leadership more generally rather than imposing more rules on the current process. YMMD, of course. Finally, I don't see your proposal the same way you describe it in your first paragraph. If one thinks about individual cases and candidacies, it seems to me that what the proposal does is to deprive the Nomcom of the option of making one particular type of hard decision while shifting no responsibility for those decisions to the community at all (even if it increases the pressure on the community to generate more candidates). best, john
