Murray, see if these paragraphs work in the draft. I've covered the points that I suggested in my point 3 that you quoted. Thanks very much for the ping!!
Section ?? - Hiring Manager Responsibilities of the Nomcom
The voting members of the Nomcom serve as hiring managers for the leadership of the IETF. That responsibility includes not only assessing whether those nominated are technically capable of the leadership roles in question but also whether they will serve well to lead others and work synergistically in the bodies, the IESG, the IAB, and the IAOC. To make good judgements on these axes, the Nomcom needs to cultivate very good listening (to interviews, to feedback). Even more so, the Nomcom should cultivate their skills of "slow thinking" as they evaluate, interview and deliberate. The Nomcom should be careful to really digest the resumes, feedback and other input about candidates, because otherwise it is too easy to pick a familiar or "famous" candidate when a less well-known candidate may have a great deal more to offer. This term "slow thinking" comes from the 2011 book "Thinking Fast and Slow" by the economics Nobelist Daniel Kahneman. Slow thinking refers to careful, thorough, deliberative processes of thought, in contrast to rapid judgements, intuition, gut feelings, all of which make up fast thinking. During fast thinking, unconscious biases have extra sway so that equal or more competent nominees may be dismissed too quickly compared with nominees who are "known quantities." Fast thinking is likely to result in not truly digesting and perceiving every candidate's skills - based on gut feelings, nominating panels give less time to the unfamiliar resumes, are less conscious of all the qualifications of the less familiar candidates. It is very important for the IETF as an organization that excellent nominees not be inadvertently overlooked.
Section ?? - A Note about Interviewing
Interviews that the Nomcom decides to conduct need to be carefully planned and organized to emphasize fairness and consistency to the candidates. While the specific procedures will be determined by each Nomcom aided by the Nomcom Chair, here are some overarching principals: it is advisable to prepare a starting slate of questions that each nominee in particular positions will all be asked; this ensures a basic fairness and also helps to make interviews complete. Each interview should have sufficient participants, including a set minimum number of voting members. One approach to organizing interviews is for the Chair to assign a Lead, a Scribe, and one or more Observers for each. The outcome of having consistently sized and organized interview panels is that all nominees will receive fair amounts of attention and sufficient efforts on interview reports to be shared with the rest of the Nomcom.
On 11 February 2015 at 02:40, Murray S. Kucherawy <superuser@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cycling back around since the threads died off:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 10:40 AM, Allison Mankin <allison.mankin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:3. A bit fuzzier, but I think important, would be to include some guiding language for Nomcoms about their task as hiring managers recruiting and selecting leadership for the IETF. I found it very important to advise my Nomcom to use "slow thinking" (in Kahneman's sense) and make sure to really digest the resumes, questionnaires and feedback, because the pace of the Nomcom and human nature tend to result in "fast" or intuitive dismissal of some really good candidates based on e.g. their having less fame. Similarly, without constraining the exact procedures, it is important to explicitly find ways to make interviews consistent across candidates and to have enough of a panel of interviewers. The pace and stress of scheduling interviews means it's important to put these goals front and center, because they are actually quite challenging to accomplish.I can propose some text for these.Hi Allison,I think I've nailed down the other two, but I would really like some text for this last one. You probably have a much better idea of what you'd like to see here than I do.
I may post -02 tonight so people can see the other proposed changes. If I do that, I can catch your text in -03.-MSK