Spencer, Laksminath, > You did something very GOOD this time - you invoked the never-before-invoked > arbitration process, instead of secretly resolving an "irresistable force > meets immovable object" dispute. Please accept credit for this good > judgement +1 INDEED. Thanks, Laksminath. And as for what to do about this problem for the future - I would suggest that we should not focus too much on this particular incident or even IAB's role. There are different confirming bodies and there are different situations. I think a good first step is to make sure the questionnaire templates are clear about what information stays strictly within the nomcom and what may be shown to confirming bodies. And clarify that feedback from the community shall never leave the nomcom, if that's not already clear. But even after doing this, the basic question of what confirming means stays open. I think the intent is that the confirming body makes a final sanity check and under normal circumstances that should be it. I understand the need for requesting some amount of information; it may well be that the candidates are not all personally known to the confirming body. CVs would be useful in this process, for instance. This is what we have been talking about on the list. However, presumably we have the confirming process to catch problems, so the more difficult case is the problem case. Hopefully this is extremely rare or non-existent. I would expect the confidentiality rules on, e.g., feedback to hold even in such a case. But it would seem a dialog between the nomcom and the confirming body would be needed, and some information would have to be exchanged -- perhaps in summarized form. "Yes, we realize A has these issues but the only other candidate B had such and such problem" or "He escaped from the institution last month? Oops, perhaps we need to go with our backup candidate instead." I have no idea how to specify the process on this so that it works under all circumstances. But my main expectation for the confirming bodies is that they do a thorough job without resorting to repeating nomcom's work or questioning the results unless a truly serious problem can be seen. Jari P.S. Since the dispute resolution results are public, I would be interested to know what kind of a report Scott would have been able to give in the plenary, had the dispute been about a person rather than the process. I hope we never have to see that. But maybe some food for thought about the confidentiality rules of this whole thing... _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf