--On Thursday, June 27, 2013 11:07 -0400 Michael StJohns <mstjohns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >... > But that's still problematic. The current rules basically > give any company who provides >= 30% of the Nomcom volunteer > pool an ~85.1% chance of having 2 members (sum of all > percentages from 2-10 members), a 12.1% chance of having 1 and > a 2.8% chance of having 0. And, of course, a few related companies or one with subsidiaries that it claims are independent and a desire to game the system can easily do so today to produce a highly-likely larger number of members, perhaps even a majority. We are clearly vunerable in that area but, perhaps inevitably, have gone down multiple ratholes as soon as we try to tighten the specifically anti-capture rules further. In particular, trying to second-guess a company's assertions about what entities are independent of it is just fraught with problems even thought such assertions can be used to subvert any, or almost any, "no more than X from one company/interest" rule. > I believe the proposal as stated would further exacerbate that > problem - not for a given company, but for pretty much locking > small companies and individuals out of the Nomcom. Once > scenario for this - both benign intentions and non-benign - is > that a company instead of sending one person to all the > meetings starts rotating the opportunity to attend the IETF > among a number of people - say 5. So instead of the potential > of say 30 volunteers from one company, we now suddenly have > 150. And me with my single person consultancy - still only > has 1 slot to volunteer. Yes, but... (i) Some reasonable set of "demonstrate clue" provisions, if adopted along with the "demonstrate participation" ones, would tend to counter that, and might even reduce the available 30 (or whatever number one picks). (ii) A notion of "some remote participation is ok if you can demonstrate clue/ groking the IETF in some other way" actually helps to protect your ability to volunteer if you suddenly missed a few consecutive meetings and that of other one-person consultancies (including, in the interest of full disclosure, me) and academics like Brian) who have discovered that, as in-person attendance rises, they need to be selective about face to face attendance. If one (and, equivalently, one's one-person consultancy) can't volunteer, the likelihood of being selected are zero (and really easy to calculate). (iii) Unless all of those 150 people were actually participating actively and contributing to IETF work, the company's actual ability to influence the standards process would go down. > While it would be good to have more people involved, it would > be bad in the ways in which larger companies could game the > system. While I agree, I think it would be really unfortunate if we discarded opportunities to get a broader spectrum of people involved because of fears that come company or companies might misbehave. I think at least two things work in our favor in the latter regard. We can try to educate participants and their organizations about how little marginal commercial advantage they would gain by, e.g., getting an extra person on the IETF and be sure that our other procedures and safeguards reinforce that. For example, the reputational harm a company, to say nothing of the individuals involved, would suffer from a few recalls based on collusion in support of company positions would far exceed any possible advantages from having more people in leadership positions. I think there is also evidence of courts and competitiveness/ antitrust authorities being _very_ unsympathetic to organizations who try to subvert open standards processes. They, of course, also have the resources and authority to untangle relationships that we do not. best, john