Re: Updating BCP 10 -- NomCom ELEGIBILITY

[Dave Cridland <[e-mail]>]

On 13 February 2015 at 18:55, Murray S. Kucherawy <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 9:44 AM, Dave Cridland <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> c) The "NomCom eligibility" rules govern essentially any say in the
>> leadership of the IETF.
>>
>
> I disagree.  "Eligibility for NomCom" and "having a say in IETF
> leadership" are not synonyms.
>
>
That's true to the extent that a sitting NomCom listens to feedback without
considering the "NomCom eligibility" of the person providing it, yes.

However it's considerably harder for me to, for example, get an RFC 3777
Recall action going, since my say explicitly does not count there.

So I admit I'm not wholly right, but I'm not wholly wrong either.

A sensible way of managing this change to avoid disruption would be to
>> provide several distinct criteria for eligibility, and select from each
>> pool proportionally, changing the proportions over time. So recall, for
>> example, might need 15 meeting attendees and 5 people qualifying under
>> active participation rules to initiate, gradually changing to emphasize
>> active participation.
>>
>
> This might be a reasonable starting point.  What are your thoughts on
> Michael's proposals for measuring active participation?
>
>
Essentially on the right track, but not right.

0) I'm happy to include "attended meeting", though I think there'd be
significant value in expressing it as a percentage of working group
sessions over the past one/two years, rather than just attendance to the
meeting in general. Again, I hear what people say about hallway discussions
and I don't disagree about the value there, but my gut feeling is that this
would be a metric more closely approximating what is sought here. But maybe
this doesn't matter.

1) AUTH48 is interesting as a metric; it's clearly an indicator of a
document actually getting published, and one that doesn't get delayed
outside the author's control unlike publication. Moreover, anyone going
through AUTH48 has had to deal with an IESG telechat on their document;
that's extremely useful experience in leadership selection. Possibly "last
call" and "telechat" are also good enough - and interesting in as much as a
document that "fails" last call is arguably as important a contribution as
one that goes on to publication.

Document shepherds and working group chairs are both clearly contributing.

I'd say that authors should be included here (and I'd go for "active"
authors in the document uploader sense), but perhaps that's covered by the
next item.

2) I think the document uploader concept is good, but limiting the
documents to only those which get scheduled time in a WG session isn't so
good; some WGs don't meet often, or even at all, and a document that's so
well crafted that it doesn't need discussion in a face to face meeting is a
really good document in my opinion. Clearly we don't want arbitrary
documents either. Any WG document would seem a "good" contribution, and I
suspect any document with a shepherd assigned should be safe, too, since
that effectively implies an expectation to publish.

3) This works for WGs that use a ticketing system and have meetings. Not
sure what percentage that actually is.

I understand that Michael is trying to propose a metric for adequately
measuring working group participation, but I don't think such a metric
exists.

We could have each active working group just submit up to X names agreed by
rough consensus any time an eligible pool is needed (ie, during NomCom
calls for volunteers). This is harder to deal with for Recall actions,
though.

4) I currently do this for the XSF Board, so it seems reasonable to me.
Again, this would provide very good experience of the incumbent leadership,
which'd seem useful to have in the core of NomCom.

Other observations:

a) I think that (0), (4), and (1-3) fit in different pools. You don't want,
I suspect, a NomCom filled with only I* meeting scribes, for example. To
put it another way, applying quotas (minimal and maximal) to the make-up of
the NomCom is fine, and quite interesting. (Thought experiment: What would
happen if the NomCom was exclusively made up from Asian, African, and
female members? How would that affect the nominations?)

I suspect that pools/quotas also make the system much harder to game in
practise.

b) I think WG Chairs might be a pool as well.

c) I suspect that whichever way we do this, the potential influence of a WG
Chair increases as a result, and I'm unaware of an appeal action for WG
Chair selection. This might be my own ignorance, but either way we'll need
one.

Dave.