Re: Updating BCP 10 -- NomCom ELEGIBILITY

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

--On Wednesday, February 11, 2015 00:50 -0800 "Murray S.
Kucherawy" <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Let's suppose it's perpetual, and then I disappear for three
> years (nine meetings).  Now I reappear at IETF 104, which will
> probably be in Minneapolis.  Since IETF 91, I opened a single
> ticket on a document in DNSOP around the time of IETF 100, and
> I acted as IAOC scribe once around the time of IETF 103.  I
> have paid no attention whatsoever in the intervening years to
> ietf@, to any administrative or technical plenary, gone to any
> of the working groups or training sessions (even remotely),
> participated in no hallway track discussions, and not
> otherwise engaged in any way.  Should I be eligible to serve
> on the NomCom as a selecting member?

Let me turn this question around, introducing a possibility that
we have no way to measure but that anyone who watches meetings
carefully knows happens.  Suppose a hypothetical individual,
Elmer, attended all of IETF 89, 90, and 91.  His definition of
"attended" consists of signing up, paying the registration fee,
showing up at the registration desk to collect a badge, and then
attending the social and/or bits-and-bytes if either is held.
In IETF 89 and 90, he sat in on a few WG meetings and signed the
blue sheets, but spent the time reading email, text-chatting
with friends, and contributed absolutely nothing to the
discussion, not even paying enough attention to hums.  At IETF
91, he spent the week on the beach.  He has never posted
anything substantive to the IETF list or any WG list, although
he has gotten caught up in some of the threads most charitably
described as comedy and contributed to the noise.

I may be exaggerating -- I don't personally know of cases that
bad.  But I have reason to believe that there are
near-approximations out there.

I don't think we want him as a selecting member of the Nomcom
either.  I don't know how to make easy measurements that would
identify him and keep him off if his company decided he'd be
useful to have on the Nomcom to get more of their employees
selected to key roles.  But let's at least try to remember that
3/5 is nothing more than an easy-to-measure but very weak
surrogate for "has a clue about what is going on".   If I had to
make a choice, I'd prefer the scenario Murray outlines to Elmer
although I'm not wild about either.

One other observation: please remember that we've entangled
"Nomcom eligibility" with a number of other things including,
IIR, eligibility to apply for other positions and the ability to
participate in attempts to remedy gross injustice or malfeasance
by recalling members of various bodies.  We either need to
decouple those things or we need to consider how changing (or
not changing) Nomcom eligibility might affect them.

     john