Hi Lakshminath,
Good point. Its possible that you would get (some) more input with the new system. My guess is though that you'd still need to poll specific groups to get the input, because people are typically not very eager to do things unless you remind them. But its likely that if you get very extreme candidates (particularly bad ones), you might get a lot of input on that particular person.
The main result, I think, would be that you would get more balanced input, and from a wider set of people.
Anyway, your description below tells another story as well. We've been basically asking in this thread whether confidentiality is important or not. Its important to realize that there is no "nomcom only" confidentiality. What we have is a situation where not only the nomcom, but a fairly large group of people in the area know, and a many "insiders" (e.g., people who know a lot of potential candidates) know. We might wonder how useful this confidentiality is for the candidates who, for some reason, wish to have confidentiality. Many key people that you'd be working with know that you were running.
Please note that I'm not critizing your input collection system. You definately need the input! But in reality, the confidentiality may not be quite as tight as one might believe. Plus I at least prefer the IETF to operate in an open, transparent manner. And I want to all the participants to have the same capability to provide input. Of course, its still the nomcom that is in charge of the selections -- this leaves you still the possibility to decide for yourselves, favor input from someone (e.g. outgoing AD) more than Joe Random Neverbeentoietf. So I'd say we don't have a problem with electioneering, nor does this proposal turn the IETF to a voting organization.
--Jari
In the current Nomcom, a few of us compiled lists of all WG contributors (chairs, advisers, current I-D editors and authors) within each area; and our Nomcom chair used a script to randomly select a subset from those lists, and then used a 2-step process to seek feedback. The first was to ask each potential feedback provider whether he/she would agree to keep the list of candidates confidential, and the second to ask for feedback, with the option of providing it anonymously.
Sure the above process could be tweaked, but as it is does not result in Nomcoms going "only to IETF management people" for feedback. Does it possibly exclude folks who are enthusiastic about providing feedback? Yes, but I think overall, it is quite fair.
I do think sending the candidate lists to ietf@xxxxxxxx for feedback has the downside potential of everyone commenting on a few of the candidates or lists (i.e., areas). That, if/when happens, is practically useless for 2 reasons: Nomcom doesn't get feedback on all lists, and a huge amount of feedback might be impossible to parse and compile for humans :-).
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