Mike,
I don't agree with constraining Chairs to past Nomcom voting members. I think that our voting members have great abilities and insights, but I'd like for the ISOC CEO to have a bigger pool of possible choices, because organizing and executing all the steps of the Nomcom process is extremely demanding and many people either don't feel they could do it, or can't get management support for giving so much time and effort. Â
A future chair can make up the numbers as an observer in interviews. I'm sure the past chair sometimes feels a bit disengaged too, after having had so much work to do, but this isn't a show-stopper.
Here's the problem I see - you're proposing that the future chair take his position at the Third IETF. That's actually about 8 months additional, not four as you suggested (Third IETF to Second IETF is about 8 months). Doing it then gives the current members of the Nomcom insufficient time to get their feet under them so that selection of one of the current members as Future chair becomes much less probable. And that would be a *bad thing* IMHO.
Selecting a future chair from the past 40 or so nomcom members gives you a reasonable pool. It's unclear you can do the job as well as it can be done without experience in being a member.
Alternately, have the ISOC chair appoint the future chair and have the future chair be a voting member. Or a voting member that only votes to break ties. It might actually be useful to have one consciously selected voting member rather than all being selected by lot. And it will give the Future Chair the experience he/she needs to run the next nomcom.
That means that the chair terms will mostly be 3 years (Future, Chair, Past Chair). That's a lot of commitment.
Of course, then you have to come up with a set of rules for what happens when the Future Chair can't actually serve as Chair.
Later, Mike
Allison
On 9 January 2015 at 13:49, Michael StJohns <mstjohns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
- At 01:34 PM 1/9/2015, Michael Richardson wrote:
- >2) several of us suggest that the Chair for year X, be appointed prior to the
- >  the beginning of the Third IETF of year X-1. This permits the
- >Â Â chair-elect/future-chair, to participate and learn about the process prior
- >  to starting. While this adds about 4 months to the duration of the chair
- >Â Â duties, it probably reduces their stress sufficiently that they will live
- >Â Â an extra year longer.
- It used to be usual that the Chair for year X was a member of Nomcom X-1. Doing a quick review I see that there are a number of recent (last 10 or so) years where that isn't the case.
- It may be time to try and add that back into the chair selection criteria with increased emphasis.
- It may also be time to add "MUST have been a nomcom member in the last 4 years" to that selection criteria.
- I wouldn't do the overlap - the role of the "future chair" would need to be that of a mute fly on the wall to keep from perturbing the process. Kind of boring IMHO.
- Mike