In addition to trying to guess what the "talent-set" requirement is for a complete slate, the NomCom
also has to try to figure out balance on a lot of different dimensions. Company-mix, representation
by regions, extra skills and/or tools each AD might bring to the table, etc.
In fact, having worked through this, the single biggest dread a NomCom might face is the potential
that the IAB may decide to exercise a line-item veto on nominated candidates - either forcing the
NomCom to effectively start over, or giving the NomCom a clear indication that their effort to come
up with a balanced slate was a complete waste of time.
I'm still trying to figure out where this "requirement" came from. It seems to pop up in each and every nomcom, but is no where in RFC3777.
The phrase in 3777 that is appropriate is:
The confirming body may reject individual candidates, in which case the nominating committee must select alternate candidates for the rejected candidates.
Please note NOT an alternate slate, but an alternate candidate or candidates. Confirmation is done per nominee, NOT per slate. The Nomcom MAY NOT start over if one of its candidates is rejected. It MAY NOT pull the slate back.
And this "line item veto" is the only veto available to the confirming body.
Unfortunately, this phrase follows one of the more useless sections which has (my opinion) caused no end of harm:
If some or none of the candidates submitted to a confirming body are confirmed, the confirming body should communicate with the nominating committee both to explain the reason why all the candidates were not confirmed and to understand the nominating committee's rationale for its candidates.
The confirming body does not have a reason or reasons for why a candidate is rejected, it has a vote or result rejecting that candidate. Individual members of the confirming body have reasons, some or all of which they may or may not care to state. The only thing the Nomcom should infer is that the confirming body (or a sufficient portion thereof) did not agree with the nomcom as to the suitability of that specific candidate for that specific position and it should then try again. To put it succinctly, it's not the process it's the person - the nomcom didn't do anything wrong, they just came to a conclusion that the confirming body couldn't support and the Nomcom should just move on to the next fully qualified candidate for that position.
The nominations and confirmation process is not and should not be a negotiation between the Nomcom and a confirming body.
The Nomcom shouldn't spend it's time trying to craft the perfect slate of candidates. It needs to put good people in each of the spots, and if you need to sacrifice balance to attain that, then you sacrifice balance and move on. In fact balance should only come into play when you have two fully qualified people for a slot where it may make sense to take the lesser (but still fully qualified) candidate to "balance" the slate.
The Nomcom has a hard job - but it needs to do the job one position at a time and not make its job harder. Pick the best qualified people and move on.
I say this as a former Nomcom member, former Nomcom Chair and former Nomcom past-chair.
Mike
ps -
The difference between a engineer and a bureaucrat is that the engineer takes large insolvable problems and breaks them down into solvable pieces, while the bureaucrat takes solvable problems and combines them into large insolvable masses. Each and every position to be filled is in someways a solvable problem, but trying to find the absolute perfect combination of people (for some value of perfect) is possibly close to intractable.