Re: List of volunteers for the 2021-2022 NomCom

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Monday, June 28, 2021 03:41 +0200 Carsten Bormann
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 2021-06-28, at 03:21, John C Klensin <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>> 
>> how
>> much bigger we would need to make the pool to overcome the
>> number of volunteers from that company, i.e., to make their
>> fraction of the volunteers small enough relative to the total
>> to significantly reduce the chances of their ending up with
>> two Nomcom members.

Carsten,

Noting that I agree with Brian that trying to make a change of
this nature (as distinct from extending the sign-up window and
stimulating people to volunteer) is too much to try to do on the
fly (and hence for this year)...

> Easy: randomly (*) select 10 companies (clusters) making up
> the nomcom, and then randomly select one volunteer from each
> company.
> 
> Let's see how well this process proposal goes :-)

> (*) OK, you get to choose the exact way this randomness works,
> and that may include weighting by number of volunteers.  So we
> may still have a way to make sure there is enough big-company
> representation in the nomcom.

This strikes me as a terrible idea.  While, for a variety of
reasons, I can't volunteer (at least without dropping all other
IETF work for the duration), there are still some of us who
really are individual participants with no company affiliation.
At least without making it horribly complicated, the method you
suggest would almost certainly either keep them off the Nomcom
or keep employees of many companies off.  What you are
proposing, as I understand it, would basically determine which
10 companies get to do determine the future of the IETf in a
given cycle, an even worse option from a diversity standpoint
than what we have today.

If we wanted to go down the path of more effectively limiting
the ability of organizations to guarantee themselves Nomcom
seats, we could preserve the spirit of the current model by
setting a threshold such that, for companies that had more than
a handful* of people in the pool, a preliminary randomization
and draw would be run for each such company to determine a small
number** of their people who would be part of the final pool and
draw.  Then the normal procedure would be run as usual on the
adjusted pool, with no organization having enough people in the
pool to guarantee Nomcom seats.

But, again, I think even discussing such options would be
something for normal procedures and the 2022-2023 Nomcom at the
earliest.

    john


* A deliberately vague number, requiring discussion.

** An even more vague number, presumably with  lower bound of
two and an upper one of, say, a handful.