At 10:36 AM 9/16/2014, Stephen Kent wrote: >I like Dave's suggestion i.e., reduce the per-company NOMcom appointment >limit to 1 from 2. > >It's not a perfect solution, but it's clear, simple to implement, and >the intent is obvious. > >Steve As I said, I did take a look at that approach, and it is *better* than the current process for some value of *better". But it still has the characteristic that by overloading the volunteer pool, a company can pretty much guarantee its representation on the Nomcom. The formula is basically "P = 1-(1-n)^10" where P is the probability of having a member and "n" is the proportion the company has of the volunteer pool. E.g. A company with 15% of the volunteer pool has an 80% chance of having a member of the nomcom. Turning the formula around to how many volunteers you need to get a specific result, you get "n = 1-ROOT (1-P, 10)" So to have a 95% chance of having a member, you need about a 26% share of the Nomcom volunteer pool. If you cap the share of the volunteer pool (by doing the two stage selection process I mentioned or something similar), you can set the numbers any way you want. For example, if you cap the share at 10%, and you're selecting at max one member per company, a company has about a 65% chance of having a member. If you use the same 10% cap on the pool, but allow a max of two nomcom members, a company has about a 33% chance of no member, 33% chance of 1 and 33% chance of two. I'm not sure what the right numbers are, but I would like to set things up so that overloading the nomcom pool is no longer a viable strategy (or at least has a lower payoff). Changing the cap to 1 member will reduce, but not eliminate, over representation of large companies on the Nomcom. If the change is made, then year to year 2-4 companies will provide about 30% (guesstimate based on what I remember of past volunteer pools) of the nomcom members; down from what I would guess is currently close to 50%. The question is whether that number is still too high or not? Later, Mike Note: This is all binomial distribution probability stuff. In excel, the probability pulling exactly N black balls (nomcom positions) out of Y pulls (10 nomcom slots) given a P percentage of black balls (nomcom volunteers) in the pool is =BINOMDIST (N, Y, P, FALSE). When you're doing Y pulls, and you cap successes at N, then the result is the sum of N to Y of that function (e.g. the probability of pulling at least 2 black balls is the sum of the probabilities of pulling 2, 3, 4...10 black balls). I used that to play around with various scenarios. For instance, assume that 4 companies collectively have a 50% share of the volunteer pool and that each individual company is capped at 1 member. The numbers work out to about an 82% chance the companies will share 4 members, a 12% chance of 3, 5% of 2 and 1% of 1. That goes to looking at the nomcom representation on a longer term basis than year to year. If the cap is 2 (as it has been in years past), that gives you a 27% chance of 0-3members, a 20% chance of 4, a 25% chance of 5, a 20% chance of 6, 12% chance of 7 and a 5.5% chance of 8.