Re: Consolidating BCP 10 (Operation of the NomCom)

[Spencer Dawkins <[e-mail]>]

Hi, Murray,

On 09/04/2014 01:09 AM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> Colleagues,
>
> As part of my work with NomCom '14, I'm preparing a revision of 
> RFC3777 that incorporates all of the updates made to it subsequent to 
> its publication ten years ago.  This would roll all of the documents 
> making up the NomCom's definition and procedures into one place.
>
> The draft is available here:
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kucherawy-rfc3777bis/
>
> It is at present nothing more than a republishing of RFC3777 verbatim, 
> with some slight organization adjustments that come along with 
> conversion to xml2rfc (RFC3777 was done in nroff), and all of the 
> changes made by the other documents that currently comprise BCP 10 
> have been incorporated.  There have been no other substantive content 
> changes made.
>
> My plan is to keep it that way for this go-around. Then, if the 
> community would like to actually crack open the document and revisit 
> some of the content, that would be a second project (for which I would 
> probably volunteer to act as editor).
>
> Comments welcome.

Thank you for doing this work. It looks good. I know that wasn't easy 
because every word matters :-)

I have some comments you may wish to consider.

--

This isn't text you changed in this revision, but it jumped out at me 
for the first time.

3.2.  Nominating Committee Principal Functions

    The principal functions of the nominating committee are to review
    each open IESG, IAB, and IAOC position and to nominate either its
                                               ^^ ^^^^^^^^
    incumbent or a superior candidate.

That text hasn't changed since http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2027 in 
October 1996.

I've always tried to use "nominee" to describe Nomcom inputs, and 
"candidate" to describe Nomcom outputs. That's the way I read the 
definitions, anyway.

The previous section correctly calls what Nomcom is doing "selection of 
candidates", as in

3.1.  Completion Due

(deleted down to)

    The annual process is comprised of three major components as follows:

    1.  The selection and organization of the nominating committee
        members.

    2.  The selection of candidates by the nominating committee.
            ^^^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^^^^^^
    3.  The confirmation of the candidates.

I know this is supposed to be as small a revision as possible, but if 
the two descriptions really do conflict, and you don't want to preserve 
the conflict, I'd suggest "to select either its incumbent or a superior 
nominee as the candidate".

--

3.7.1.  Positions To Be Reviewed

deleted down to

    The IESG, IAB, and IAOC are responsible for providing summary of the
                                              "summaries" ^^^^^^^
    expertise desired of the candidates selected for their respective
    open positions to the Executive Director.  The summaries are provided
    to the nominating committee for its consideration.

--

4.13.  Open Positions

    The Chair (or the IETF Executive Director, if no Chair has been named
    four weeks after the first IETF meeting of the year) obtains the list
    of positions to be reviewed and announces it along with a
    solicitation for names of volunteers from the IETF community willing
    to serve on the nominating committee.

    If the IETF Executive Director issues the solicitation for
    volunteers, the IETF Executive Director must also collect responses
    to the solicitation and provide the names of volunteers to the
    incoming nominating committee Chair when the incoming nominating
    committee Chair is named.

 >   At the Chair's request, the IETF Secretariat may perform other
 >   clerical support tasks, as long as the task being performed does not
 >   require nominating committee Chair judgment, in the nominating
 >   committee Chair's opinion, and as long as the community is
 >   appropriately notified that this request is being made.  This request
 >   may come from the incoming nominating committee Chair (if one has
 >   been selected for this nominating committee cycle) or the previous
 >   nominating committee Chair (if the search for an incoming nominating
 >   committee Chair is still underway).

I was probably the one who put this paragraph where it is, but on 
reflection, it really has nothing to do with the rest of the section. 
Maybe move it to its own section about "Other Duties Performed by the 
IETF Secretariat"?