re: proposal for random selection process for nominations

[Craig Partridge <[e-mail]>]

> If we do not trust the ombudsman enough simply to choose names out of
> a hat, then we have a problem.

Chuck:

    One can certainly have the ombudsman pick out of a hat at a public meeting.
That works too -- but we have a tradition of trying to use the network and
avoid extra meetings.  That means a distributed procedure -- voila software.

    You may wonder why the ombudsman cannot just pick out of a hat in private.
The reason is that folks will note the procedure can easily be rigged.
Furthermore, the probabilities of a random selection process mean that the
resulting slate will occasionally look suspicious to some parties.  For
example, what do you think the probability is if all the IAB and IESGers
volunteer to serve on the nominations committee, that the nominations
committee of 7 will have 3 or more IAB/IESG members on it (an effective
majority)?

    The answer is about 25% (assuming we get around 120 volunteers, which
I suspect is a goodly number).

    Now, if this spring, the Ombudsman announces that a nomination committee
with heavy IAB/IESG membership, I suspect there will be some people who are
bothered by the composition of the committee, and we'd like to be able to show
very clearly that the selection was random, and further that the ombudsman
didn't pick several random slates until she got one she liked.  So a public
process is necessary.

Craig

PS: I haven't done all the analysis, but I suspect if you do, you'll discover
that the chances of at least one IESG or IAB member *NOT* being picked is
so small that the ex-officio membership turns out not to be necessary.