Hi, on 2006-08-31 17:33 Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 said the following: > Brian, > > The advice you gave is exactly the opposite of that in RFC 3797, the > latest version of my non-binding guidelines for publicly verifiable > random selection. Note in particular that Section 5.1 of that RFC says > (with the all caps words in the original): > > 5.1. Uncertainty as to the Pool > > Every reasonable effort should be made to see that the published pool > from which selection is made is of certain and eligible persons. > However, especially with compressed schedules or perhaps someone > whose claim that they volunteered and are eligible has not been > resolved by the deadline, or a determination that someone is not > eligible which occurs after the publication of the pool, it may be > that there are still uncertainties. > > The best way to handle this is to maintain the announced schedule, > INCLUDE in the published pool all those whose eligibility is > uncertain and to keep the published pool list numbering IMMUTABLE > after its publication. If someone in the pool is later selected by > the algorithm and random input but it has been determined they are > ineligible, they can be skipped and the algorithm run further to make > an additional selection. Thus the uncertainty only effects one > selection and in general no more than a maximum of U selections where > there are U uncertain pool members. > > Other courses of action are far worse. Actual insertion or deletion > of entries in the pool after its publication changes the length of > the list and totally scrambles who is selected, possibly changing > every selection. ... > > The presence of ineligible persons in the list is no reason whatsoever > to reset. I think this is well reasoned by Donald. Permitting a reset opens the door on the possibility for a NomCom chair to include ineligible persons, and subsequently, if he doesn't like the result, declare a reset and re-do the selection. We avoid this by keeping to the original numbered and published pool of people, permitting one single run of the random number generation mechanism, and then use that to select members from the original numbered published pool (rejecting ineligible choices) until the desired number of eligible NomCom members have been chosen. (And to be clear, I don't mean that there is *any* foul play in the current situation, just that we don't want a process which opens the door on that possibility.) Regards, Henrik _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf