Dear colleagues, I work for the Internet Society though this is not an Internet Society opinion. I will note, however, that the views I outline here are ones I've held for a while and ones that certainly affected my thinking when appointing a Nomcom Chair. On Sun, Jul 21, 2024 at 03:41:23PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
Except that the whole nomcom selection process is designed to be transparent and resistant to rigging, so having a private discussion seems iffy for that reason.
I could not disagree more with that conclusion. While much of the selection process is intended to be transparent, the discretion of the Chair is pretty broad in practically everything touching on the entire Nomcom process. We depend on the Chair to exercise diligence, discretion, openness, and (perhaps above all) devotion to the IETF in operating the Nomcom each year, and it seems to me that this is a case where we have to permit those virtues to function. I think it would be a terrible mistake to try to engineer rules for when-is-someone-independent when the Chair's virtues are almost certainly likely to be a better guide than some kind of algorithm. This is _especially_ true because, of course, independent contractors may well have clients (or even one very large client) that could also bring influence to bear, and yet we do not require disclosure of client lists and so on. Indeed, for a corporation's employees, one very large customer could in theory bring a lot of pressure to bear about preferred outcomes, yet we do not require every employee of any corporation to produce comprehensive customer lists (and I hope even suggesting that would be met with the derision I think it deserves). Finally, suppose that some Nomcom member were nefariously hiding their True Motivations behind putative independent status, and said member was actually nursing a private agenda. Well, that's what the other Nomcom members are for. None of the Nomcom members needs to be perfectly unbiased because, we hope, the composition of the Nomcom has whittled away the advantage that this or that bias might have. Far better to put the kind of energy that would be needed to make a rule about "independent enough" into problems like how to face down systemic irrelevant biases that are likely to creep into Nomcom deliberations just because of the composition of the community in the first place, without yet diluting the bias towards IETF competence the Nomcom is likely to have because of the eligibility criteria. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
