Re: [Eligibility-discuss] [Gendispatch] New Version Notification for draft-knodel-nomcom-gender-representation-00.txt

[Michael StJohns <[e-mail]>]

On 11/23/2023 12:18 PM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 10:45 PM Michael StJohns 
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>
>     We pick randomly, and with the exception of the 2 person per org
>     limit,
>     any volunteer has an equal weight in being selected.  If you believe
>     some group is underrepresented in the pool, the solutions is to
>     recruit
>     members of that group to volunteer.
>
>
> There are two distinct issues:
>
> 1. Whether women are sufficiently represented in the nomcom selection 
> pool.
> 2. Whether women are sufficiently represented in a given nomcom.
>
> As Christian (and I earlier) noted, because the nomcom itself is quite 
> small,
> it is possible for women to be very underrepresented in a given nomcom
> with respect to the underlying pool. You may believe that's not an issue,
> but to the extent to which it is an issue, I don't think "try to get 
> more women
> into the pool" is a plausible response to that issue.
>
> -Ekr
>
Hi Ekr -

To the extent not having a POV from a specific community is a problem, 
the chair of the Nomcom has a tool to resolve that - the appointment of 
a non-voting liaison or advisor.  Yes, this person will not get a vote, 
but as they participate in the discussions - including those for 
candidates - they can bring their concerns to the attention of the 
voting members.  As can the ex officio members  of the nomcom who are 
also members of that community.

Reserving a spot on the Nomcom for a member of a given community seems 
fraught.  What's next?  Reserving a slot for the south American 
participants?  The Antarctica participants?  North American?   Left 
handed?  Wine drinkers? Beer Drinkers? Etc.  I would put that general 
tool of mandatory selection from a community in the category of non-useful.

    Digression on left handed people: "Brain scans indicate that
    left-handed people think differently from right-handed people. They
    tend to activate the right half of their brain more for certain
    tasks and functions."

On the question of the size of the Nomcom - we've been at 10 since the 
start.  We've mostly doubled the work load.  It may be time to increase 
the size to say 15 or 16.   This would allow for more opportunities to 
serve, for the math to select more people of any given community or 
grouping, and would reduce the impact of the organizations that can 
populate larger portions of the volunteer pool and are almost guaranteed 
to serve.

It's possible for any community to be underrepresented (or for that 
matter overrepresented) in any Nomcom - that's just how random selection 
works.    If you want to avoid that, probabilisticly,  you add members 
of that community to the source pool.  You might still end up with no 
members from the group, but over time it will balance out.

  Other organizations use a different method for selecting their 
leadership, and some have designated people per community (e.g. the IETF 
sends nomcom members to ISOC for example).

So a big no on this document and this approach from me based on the 
existing tools and the fact that the naive algorithm proposed would have 
some interesting side effects.

If we did reserve a slot and we got to the end with 10 non-community 
members, I'd go back and randomly select from the entirety of the 
community member volunteers.  If the selected one was also a member of 
one of the max-2 orgs I'd randomly replace one of the two members with 
that person.  If not, I'd pick 1-10 and replace that member even if it 
reduced one of the max-2 orgs. This is not a simple algorithm, but is 
less unfair (probability wise) than the one proposed.

Later, Mike