But recently there have been fears that if the 11th (or whatever) person is from sponsor X and someone (or two) from sponsor X is in the first 10, if sponsor X thinks this 11th person would be better on the nomcom they might pressure the selected person to refuse to serve. Or if the 11th person is from a customer of Sponsor X a sponsor X selected person could refuse to serve so as to give this customer a voting nomcom membership. Etc.
This could be mitigated by having "any sponsor who has a slot in the first tranche cannot have anyone in the backup." rule. So, Acme Tool and Die could have either one or two people in the first / primary set — but they cannot have anyone in the backup set. This way there is no way for someone to decline and have someone else from their company appointed… but, yes, it doesn't solve the "the 11th person is from a customer of Sponsor X", or Pete's "Rich (who is number 11 on the list) will stand up to mean Warren, so I'll step down"...
No it can't. Because - objectively - no one except the person
declining to serve knows absolutely why they declined to serve.
It may be a fact that (using Warren's list) #2's company has a
contract with #5s company and that #5 company reaches out and
suggests that it would be for the benefit of both of them if #2
dropped out. #2 may not even know why he's been asked to drop out
and may be told nothing more than he's going to be too busy to
participate on the company nickel.
There are objective triggers to this process (e.g. #2 wasn't qualified and hence needed to be skipped over resulting in #5 being selected and subjective triggers (I saw the list and I'm not going to serve with this bunch of weasels, or I took a new job and I don't have the time, or someone asked me to step down and its in my best interest to do so, or the next guy on the list could do it better). Any of the latter reasons absolutely need a new random selection. I'd also put death of the volunteer in the objective category, but almost nothing else (including reported illness) except the ineligibility.
Practically, using the current source of random seeds is painful
and requires way too much advance notice. As I noted elsewhere,
we've got good quality public random sources available now that
meet all the requirements of a verifiable random seed and they
produce new values around every 30 seconds or so. Let's dump the
1970's resolve a wargame attack stuff and move to something that
is a bit more useful in the current time. We don't even need to
change the document that Don wrote oh so many years ago.
Later, Mike
