[Eligibility-discuss] Re: [Gendispatch] Re: Re: Re: Comments on Composition and Comportment of the IETF Nominating Committee draft

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 19, 2026, at 12:24, Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]> wrote:
> In no technical working group is credentialism accepted.  If somebody asks for citations or data to back up a claim, that's considered perfectly reasonable, regardless of the level of expertise of the person making it.

Again, my complaint was not the request for citations, but the bold assumption that the statement couldn't be backed up by citations. I think citations here would be helpful and good.

> This is becoming quite a sidetrack from the underlying question of "does increasing the representation of non-male-identified participants on the nomcom help the IETF achieve its mission of producing high quality relevant technical and engineering documents".  If we get a perfectly diverse leadership group and reduce our ability to do that at the same time, we have become a different organisation, so please let's look at this under the lens of "how does this help the IETF achieve its mission" and then find a pathway that doesn't drag too many people away from that mission for too long.

If we were to impose quotas on the representation in leadership that might well be an issue, but we are talking about nomcom, not the IESG or the IAB. Presumably people who are qualified to sit on nomcom are capable of distinguishing between qualified candidates and unqualified candidates.