Dear colleagues,
I work for the Internet Society but this is very definitely not an Internet Society opinion. I write instead as someone who served as a liaison to a nomcom as well as someone who was on a liaison-appointing body.
On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 07:31:34PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
either or both will be made public beyond the Chair and Voting
Members who have an obligation of confidentiality.
My understanding of my role as a liaison when I was one, and my reading of the relevant RFCs at least at the time, was absolutely that the liaison had exactly the same obligations with respect to confidentiality as any voting member. I recall everyone involved at the time as agreeing with such an obligation, as well. So whatever the distinction might once have been, at least in my experience there was no such distinction except in the capacity of voting or not voting in the decisions, and in being aware of that distinction and being deferential towards it.
I don't disagree, and I don't think John does. BUT. The
question was about how someone would make a confidential comment
to the Nomcom that was not shared with the Liaisons. That
suggests that there's a need to do so or at least someone believes
there is a need to do so. So maybe let's address that rather than
extolling the commitments of the liaisons to confidentiality.
While I agree that the non-voting members and advisors are bound
to confidentiality, that's not necessarily what this is about.
The US military and intelligence communities (and I would expect
many other countries) differentiate being cleared for information
(and signing all the binding oaths) from have a need to know.
It's unclear to me that the non-voting members (with the exception
of the chair and past chair) have a universal need-to-know.
Unfortunately the evolution of the process, the addition of more
liaisons, the addition of advisors, and the current tool set make
managing need-to-know problematic and mostly difficult. (Side
comment - why can the various boards have various levels of
executive session, but this wasn't contemplated for the Nomcom?)
This year, there are exactly as many non-voting participants as
voting members. And according to the rules, all of those
non-voting participants get to comment and discuss and vote on
everything except the candidate selections. I'm concerned about
this as a large quantity of "advisors" has the potential for undue
influence, regardless of best intentions.
When I was on the IAB, moreover, we definitely did _not_ believe that the liaison had a responsibility for information flow back to us. We believed that the liaisons were a conduit of the views and understanding of the IAB with respect to needs and so forth in the community. The liaison also acted as an effective way of getting questions back to the IAB if they needed answering. But I recall every liaison in my experience being extremely careful not to have information flowing from the nomcom to the IAB.
That is the ideal, but is something that was at times honored more in the breach (anecdotally at least). If you think about it, about all that the IAB wouldn't get related to IESG candidates were the actual votes, and the discussions on particular IESG candidates. The rest of the material that was formerly confidential has mostly been added to the report out to the confirming bodies and also to the public post-selection. The list of candidates is mostly public, but there's still an option to redact the list:
The NomCom may choose not to include some names in the disclosed list, at their discretion.
I wish we could track every bit of information flowing to/from the Nomcom, both from voting members and the others, and compare the information flow to past years. It would be interesting to see if there's more or less leakage as the group of non-voters increased in size.
Later, Mike
"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead!" - Benjamin
Franklin
I hope that is a useful perspective.
Best regards,
A
