Re: NomCom procedures revision

[Harald Alvestrand <[e-mail]>]

Den 27. aug. 2015 19:54, skrev Murray S. Kucherawy:
> Have a look at Appendix F. I plan to fill out Section 10 once we know
> for sure which changes have consensus rather than a few points that
> might still be fluid.

Some notes (this is NOT a detailed review):

Having just gone through the exercise of establishing a voting mechanism
for my nomcom, I think the following needs to go:

5.5.  Voting Mechanism

   The Chair must establish a voting mechanism.  The mechanism by which
   this is accomplished is left to the discretion of the Chair, but must
   be accepted by at least 75% of the selecting volunteers before the
   work of the committee can begin.  Once established, this procedure
   cannot be altered until the current nominating committee is
   dissolved.

A) It turns out that voting mechanisms are *tricky* beasts. The idea
that a nomcom will make them 100% right on the first try is a Bad Idea.


I suggest changing this to "Once established, the minimum threshold for
changing the procedure is 75% of the selecting volunteers".

Note: The 75% acceptance criterion is new. 75% of the selecting
volunteers is 8 people. That means that 3 people can a) block the
acceptance of any procedure and b) (with my suggested change) prevent
any change to the procedure. We should make sure that's what we want.

B) A strict interpretation of "before the work can begin" would have the
members accept the voting mechanism before they start discussing the
voting mechanism. I don't think that is a good idea.)

I suggest "before the first vote on candidates is taken" (which is very
late, but at least it's an explicit point in time).

Also, is it an obvious consensus that the chair and the liaisons should
have no input into the decision to accept the voting mechanism?


5.6.  Voting Quorum

   At least a quorum of committee members must participate in a vote.

   Only selecting volunteers vote on a candidate selection.  For a
   candidate selection vote, a quorum is comprised of at least two
   thirds of the selecting volunteers.

   At all other times, a quorum is present if at least 75% of the
   nominating committee members are participating.

It is not at all clear what a "quorum" does. In our procedures work, we
found that separating out the idea of "meeting quorum" from "voting
quorum" made a lot of sense, espcially since we chose to do secret
ballots only - which means we can't do it in a meeting anyway, and there
was actually no requirement for the members of the quorum to be present
at the same time.

It also seemed unusual to have a meeting quorum without either the chair
or the prior year's chair; we put that into the procedures too.

Note that 4.15, 5.7 and 7.1 still uses "voting member" where it should
have "selecting member".

Apologies if this reiterates previous discussions; I must admit that I
seem to have skipped those debates when they happened.

Harald