See below at @@@ -----Original Message----- From: John C Klensin [mailto:john-ietf@xxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 11:45 AM To: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008; IETF-Discussion Subject: RE: Now there seems to be lack of communicaiton here... --On Thursday, 31 August, 2006 17:30 -0400 Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <Donald.Eastlake@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > John, > > If the selection method is random, it makes no difference whatsoever > how the list of nomcom volunteers is ordered. It only matters that the > numbered list become fixed and be posted before the selection > information is available. Alphabetic or the order they volunteered or > any other order is perfectly fine. Agreed, except that an alphabetic sort is not, by any stretch of the imagination, random. Phillip's suggestion of using a well-established hash that is known to give good distributions would work; there are many other methods that would work. But a number of observable distribution issues make an alphabetic sort on names unacceptably random if one is then going to use the ordering for successive samplings/selections. @@@ I'm not sure why you agree with me and then say the opposite. If it doesn't matter what the ordering of the nomcom volunteer pool is then it doesn't matter what the ordering of the nomcom volunteer pool is, and, in particular, it doesn't matter how random or "biased" it is. The RFC 3797 algorithm takes random inputs and uses them to make successive uniformly distributed non-repeating selections from a range of integers. The sole purpose of the published ordered volunteer pool list is to provide a pre-announced mapping from those integers to the people who volunteered. If it mattered what that mapping was, then you are not making uniformly distributed random selections. @@@ Both RFC 3797 and Phil Hallam-Baker's suggestion use a well-established hash. (I happen to personally not like the details of Phil's specific suggestion because of questions related to email address canonicalization and because it would require publishing email addresses for all nomcom volunteers.) I want to stress that, given this mess has occurred, I would find just about anything the Nomcom Chair decides to do acceptable although I do not approve of his consulting the IETF Chair (or IAB Chair) in the matter. But, if we are going to make sure this problem does not occur in the future, I think we should make the procedure as gaming-proof as possible. That, to me, implies two requirements going forward: (1) We get strong randomization of the selection process @@@ We already have this. See RFC 3797. (2) We do not redraw the entire Nomcom pool and _never_ do so after anyone who has discretion has had an opportunity to see the initial list of Nomcom members. If someone is selected (or volunteers) and then determined to be ineligible, the people who have already been selected by the mechanism specified stay selected. Anything else just has a bad odor whether actual improprieties are suspected or not. @@@ It may be possible, with sufficient care, to make vanishingly small the chance that a nomcom chair discretionary decision would be needed for this aspect of nomcom selection. But I am not sure that, in the real world, it is possible to do this for all aspects of nomcom selection. See Section 5.2 of RFC 3797. In addition, I am extremely concerned by hints on this list that the Secretariat's checking procedures ruled people ineligible to volunteer who had, in fact, attended the correct number of meetings. That, it seems to me, is a much larger threat to the integrity of the Nomcom model and perceptions of trust in it than any issue that impacts a single volunteer or even, within broad limits, the randomization and Nomcom member selection processes. @@@ Well, you are welcome to be as concerned as you like, but we live in an imperfect world. As far as I know, there are usually a few disputes about the volunteer list, usually in connection with people whose eligibility the Secretariat doubts. Sometimes they are determined to be correct and sometimes the Secretariat is determined to be right. Sometimes the volunteer is confused about the eligibility requirements or about what their attendance actually was, or has variant versions of their name, or has changed their name, or ... But this sort of thing doesn't effect very many people on the volunteer list and is almost always resolved between the volunteer and the Secretariat before the list is published. john @@@ Thanks, @@@ Donald _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf