On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Doug Barton <dougb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 9/15/14 2:56 PM, Mary Barnes wrote:
On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
On 9/15/2014 2:45 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> The worst case, which is not a fantasy, is that 5 large companies encourage
> their staff to volunteer, so we end up with 5 pairs of large-company
> staff and nobody from the rest of the community. But (as Mike seems to
> imply) if we put in rules to make this impossible, we'd be even further
> from "each eligible volunteer is equally likely to be selected."
> So this does need clarity of intent, one way or the other.
Make it max 1 per company.
Real and substantial diversity is essential.
If we cannot get an adequate nomcom on that basis, we've got bigger
problems and nomcom selection isn't the place to try to solve it.
[MB] I totally agree with Dave. I think that also helps in that people
that are from bigger companies often have the most people that are
willing and more importantly able to fill the positions. Thus, this also
reduces the potential appearance of bias in terms of voting members
favoring nominees from their own companies. [/MB]
Are y'all talking about the input to the nomcom process, or the output? I don't see anything wrong with more than one candidate per company putting their name in the hat, but it's probably reasonable to limit the number of qualified applicants that go into the final selection process.
[MB] We're talking about the selection of volunteers to serve as voting members on the nomcom. It's a random selection. The current process is that if a 3rd volunteer is on the list of 10, the last one selected is dropped and then whoever ended up in position 11 of the random selection would become a voting member. [/MB]
OTOH, how do you define "a company" in this scenario? Take any of the large multinationals .... is it fair to eliminate a candidate because there is another qualified candidate who happens to work at the same "company," even though they are in different business units, different states, different countries, or even different continents?
[MB] Yes, it is a challenge, but it's something we deal with already and again, we're talking about selection of voting members of the nomcom and not leadership appointments. At this point, it's entirely up to the nomcom how many appointees from each company are selected - e.g., some nomcoms decide that the IESG should have at most 2 people from the same company. Others have decided 3 is okay. [/MB]
I totally agree with the need to avoid capture of the IETF leadership, but the problem is a lot harder to solve than you might think. It may be worthwhile for our folks who are interested in this topic to have a chat with the ICANN folks about policies and methodology that are in place there, as avoiding industry capture has been an important part of their working process since day 1, and a lot of thought has gone into it.
[MB] I think most of us know how hard the problem is to solve. It's been plaguing nomcom for years - see http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-nomcom-report-2009-00. The reality is that large companies can afford to have large numbers of people participate and attend IETF meetings (and thus qualify as voting members of nomcom) as well as the ability to fund an employee to do nearly full time work in leadership positions at the IETF. It's my understanding is that ICANN solves this problem somewhat by providing coverage of travel expenses for some of the appointments. That's a big deal for independent consultants.
[/MB]
Doug