--On Thursday, 31 August, 2006 09:38 +0200 Brian E Carpenter <brc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Full disclosure: My personal opinion, which I *did* give to > Lynn and > Andrew when I became aware of this glitch, is that a reset is > the only > way to be certain that the selection process is unbiased. Brian, I don't know about others, but I'd like to hear a little more about your reasoning (and Andrew's) about this. It seems to me that drawing a second sample would be unbiased if the decision to draw it were made before anyone knew the contents of the first sample. But, as soon as someone looks at the first sample and then has discretion as to whether to say "never mind" and draw another one, there is bias in the statistical sense. That bias may or may not be harmful, or have the appearance of being harmful, but it definitely removes the rigid randomization of a method that doesn't allow any latitude or individual choice in the selection of a candidate pool. To illustrate this, suppose that one initially drew two membership pools from the list of volunteers. Now examine the following cases: (i) Someone looks at the contents of both pools, decides which one is preferred, and picks that one. (ii) Someone decides to look at one of the two pools and then decide whether to accept it or to select the other pool. (iii) The second pool is drawn after some or all the members of the first pool are withdrawn from the initial volunteer list, with the mechanism for selecting those who are withdrawn being exogenous to the process and presumably deterministic. There are rather complex, and quite intriguing, models in statistical decision theory for examining each of these types of cases. But none of them involve "unbiased" with regard to the randomness of the selection process. john p.s. I deliberately haven't looked at the volunteer lists to determine who the relevant IAB member was, making the comment I'm about to make unbiased by that knowledge. But I believe that an IAB member who is sufficiently unfamiliar with our procedures to have volunteered to the nomcom should be seriously considering stepping down (which would not make him or her nomcom-eligible, of course). I also believe that this micro-debacle suggests that future revisions of the nomcom selection document should be explicit about two cases: (1) Sorting the nomcom volunteer pool into alphabetical order and then assigning numbers that will, in turn, be used in the determination of who gets selected is not appropriate. The sequencing of the volunteer pool should probably use a randomization process that is demonstrably independent of the randomization process that selects nomcom members from that list. (2) Just as the rules that link the date of resignation from a nomcom-selected position with rules about filling the resigned position (e.g., with regard to duration of terms) need clarification in some way that can be reviewed by the community via Last Call, we probably need absolute clarity about the relationship between the date of resignation and eligibility to serve on a Nomcom, initiate recalls, etc. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf