IETF                                                     J. Halpern, Ed.
Internet-Draft                                                  Ericsson
Expires: October 26, 2009                                 April 24, 2009


                     NomCom Chair's Report: 2008-9
                   draft-halpern-nomcom-report-00.txt

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Abstract

   This document reports on the work of the 2008-2009 IETF nominating
   committee (NomCom).  This draft summarizes the process steps that
   were used this year, and the work that was done.  This is followed by
   a discussion of process issues which caused difficulties for the



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   committee, but which require community agreement to before changes
   can be made.  Finally, there are some observations about things which
   can help future committees, and which may help the community to
   understand.


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Getting Started  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
     2.1.  Randomness and Voting Member Selection . . . . . . . . . .  3
     2.2.  Selection  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.3.  Liaisons and Confirming Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.4.  Tools  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   3.  Organization, Scheduling, and Planning . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.1.  Job Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     3.2.  Questionnaire  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   4.  Collection of Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   5.  Candidate Selection Process  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   6.  Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.1.  Volunteer exclusion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     6.2.  Liaison participation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     6.3.  Nominee List Confidentiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     6.4.  The IAB Roles  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
     6.5.  Multiple Leaders from a Company  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
     6.6.  ADs and chairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
   7.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   8.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   9.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
     9.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
     9.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
   Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14



















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1.  Introduction

   This document provides a set of observations from the 2008/2009
   nominating committee (NomCom) chair to the community.  These are
   provided in an Internet-Draft, to complement the report provided by
   the chair at the March 2009 plenary.  This is not a formal report
   from the committee, and this report represents only one of many
   possible views of the process.

   In discussing the work of the NomCom, this document often refers to
   the committees judgment of the wishes of the community.  (Or other
   similar words.)  The committee is tasked by the RFCs with making such
   judgments, and acting upon them.  As noted, in some places it is even
   expected to report those judgments as part of confirmation processes.
   However, these judgments should not be confused with formal
   determinations of rough consensus of the community, particularly as
   might apply to changing procedures.  It is not the NomCom's purview,
   nor their right, nor is it practical with the processes that are
   used, to make that sort of determination.  For any process changes to
   actually be made, separate determination of the actual rough
   consensus of the community is needed.


2.  Getting Started

   The 2008-2009 IETF Nominating committee, like all nominating
   committees for this community constituted since June 2004, was
   appointed and operated according to the rules defined in [RFC3777].
   Lynn St. Amour (ISOC President and CEO) announced my appointment on
   July 12, 2008.

2.1.  Randomness and Voting Member Selection

   I sent out the first call for volunteers to serve on the nominating
   committee on July 15th, with the list of positions to be filled.
   Several additional calls for volunteers were made, including a
   presentation at the Thursday Plenary at the Dublin IETF meeting.

   In my announcement send on August 1, 2008, I included a planned time
   line, and the random seeds to be used in conjunction with the
   procedure described in [RFC3797].  The seeds were the same as those
   used by Lakshminath Dondeti the previous year:
   o  UK National Lottery
      *  http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/player/p/results/results.do
      *  All 7 numbers (5 numbers from 1 - 50 and 2 Lucky Stars from 1 -
         9)





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   o  US National debt ("Debt Held by the Public"), published by the
      Treasury department as of August 28, 2008 (Published on August 29,
      2008)
      *  http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np
      *  Last 8 digits, ignore the commas and periods
   o  US National debt ("Intragovernmental Holdings"), published by the
      Treasury department as August 28, 2008 (Published on August 29,
      2008)
      *  http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np
      *  Last 8 digits, ignore the commas and periods
   o  Megamillions Lottery, Friday August 29, 2008
      *  http://www.megamillions.com/numbers/pastdrawings.asp
      *  All 6 numbers (including the Mega Ball)

2.2.  Selection

   The NomCom volunteer list was announced, with affiliations, for
   challenge on August 18.  No challenges were received, and the list
   was re-announced (minus the IAOC removal) on August 25.  The random
   selection URL was updated, as one of the announced URLs did not work.
   On August 30, the results of the random selection, along with the
   affiliation of the selected individuals, and all of the seed
   information was announced, starting a challenge period.  On September
   8 the NomCom was seated and I began working with the members to get
   the actual selection process in place.  The selected volunteers with
   their announced affiliation, as they were announced by email, were:
      Wasserman, Margaret; of ThingMagic moving to Sandstorm
      Isomaki, Markus; of Nokia
      Hoeneisen, Bernie; of Swisscom
      White, Russ; of Cisco
      Lepinsiki, Matthew; of BBN Technologies
      Hanna, Stephen; of Juniper Networks
      Tschofenig, Hannes; of Nokia Siemens Networks
      Aboba, Bernard; of Microsoft
      Livingood, Jason; of Comcast
      Hartman, Sam; of Painless Security

   The liaisons were Lakshminath Dondeti of Qualcomm as the previous
   year's chair, Dave Oran of Cisco as IAB Liaison, Ross Callon of
   Juniper as IESG liaison, and Bert Wijnen as ISOC Board of Trustees
   liaisons.

2.3.  Liaisons and Confirming Bodies

   I met with the IAB chair and liaison, and exchanged email with the
   ISOC liaison, to work out some of the processes.  The two topics were
   what information would be provided for confirmation, and how
   confirmation issues would be handled.



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   Even if it appears that everything is simple and clean, such
   conversations between the NomCom chair and the confirming bodies in
   advance of the work are a very good idea.

   It was agreed with regard to confirmation information that in
   addition to the descriptions of the candidates and the explanation of
   why they are being nominated, the nominating committee would provide
   most of the questionnaire to the confirming body.  The exact method
   for defining what would be kept confidential to the NomCom would be
   worked out once the NomCom was seated.

   With the IAB, it was also agreed that while the IAB would approve or
   reject an entire slate, they would provide information to the
   nominating committee with as much clarity as possible as to what the
   problems were, if there were problems.

2.4.  Tools

   One of the most important aspects in practice for the NomCom, and the
   NomCom chair, is the tools setup.  Henrik Levkowetz built and
   maintains an extremely useful tool suite for the nominating
   committee.  Henrik does not participate in the nominating committee
   activities.  However, nominating committee chairs may wish to ask him
   to officially serve as an adviser to the committee.  This allows him
   to see information needed to diagnose problems with the tools.

   The tools need to be configured properly each year.  The first piece
   of configuration required is a public / private key pair created by
   the NomCom chair.  The public key will be used by the tools.  The
   chair must arrange to deliver the private key to the NomCom members.
   The email lists are an interesting case.  The usual practice has
   been, and is recommended to be, to use a two part list.  The public
   list is maintained by the secretariat, without an archive.  It copies
   all received email to all members of the NomCom, and to a private
   list on the tools site.  The private list is indexed and archived,
   and stored encrypted with the years public key.  Via the tools,
   members can get at the full indexed, processed, email information, by
   providing the private key the NomCom chair gives them.

   The tools assist in keeping track of nominations, acceptances (or
   turn-downs), questionnaires, and feedback.  They are extremely
   useful.


3.  Organization, Scheduling, and Planning

   Starting on September 8, 2008 the NomCom organized itself, scheduled
   conference calls, and began getting its work done.



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   While I issued the initial calls for volunteers, the NomCom needed to
   get several items sorted out as quickly as possible.  Specifically,
   the job descriptions needed to be understood, and the questionnaires
   needed to be defined.

   Once those two items were clarified, the NomCom moved on to working
   out the interview process.  Interviews were conducted with a number
   of people.  Some interviews were conducted to understand the needs of
   bodies or slots to which the NomCom was responsible for making
   appointments.  Some interviews were conducted to better understand
   existing people, issues, or situations.  And interviews were
   conducted to get opinions on nominees under consideration (within the
   constraints of the confidentiality rules.)  Many people from the
   leadership bodies were interviewed.  Not all the people on any body,
   nor all the incumbents, were interviewed.  Interviews were scheduled
   based on either the committees perception that incremental
   information could be obtained usefully, or because an individual
   requested an interview.  While it has the potential to produce an
   excess of interviews, the nominating committee was able to interview
   all individuals who requested time from us.  Most interviews were
   conducted by two volunteer members of the committee.  A few of the
   interviews were conducted by larger numbers of people due to the
   importance of the topic and the potential information.  One of the
   chairs jobs became making sure that folks who had agreed to perform
   interviews actually did them.  Not due to lack of willingness, but
   because many of the committee members were quite busy.

   There were many teleconferences.  Initial calls were every two weeks,
   and then during the busy part of the cycle they were as often as
   every 6 days.  This year Cisco and Microsoft provided the conference
   call facilities, for which I thank them.  We tried a free conference
   call facility, but it had very bad international access.

3.1.  Job Descriptions

   The procedures call for the various bodies (IESG, IAB, and IAOC) to
   provide job description for the jobs that need to be filled.
   However, the nominating committee is responsible for deciding what
   qualifications and skills to actually look for, based on the provided
   job descriptions and the community feedback.

   This leads to an interesting question.  If the nominating committee
   decides that somewhat different qualifications are needed than were
   asked for, what should it do?  At the very least, it is required to
   provide the list of what it actually looked for to the confirming
   body.  It would seem helpful if, when there is a difference, the
   nominating committee could tell the community what it really wants.
   We could not find a good way to do this.  As there was no significant



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   initial difference (minor issues were discussed with liaisons), the
   nominating committee simply published the provided job descriptions.
   Later community input was used to complement those descriptions.

3.2.  Questionnaire

   There were two issues the NomCom needed to work out for the
   questionnaires.  First was what questions to ask.  This sounds easy,
   but is actually a good opportunity for the NomCom to start thinking
   about what matters to the volunteers and how they will gather
   information.  After significant exchanges, the content of the
   questionnaires was worked out.

   It probably was unfortunate that I had posted the previous years
   questionnaires on the web site, as this confused some people about
   what they were supposed to do.

   In conjunction with this, the nominating committee needed to work
   out, and coordinate with the confirming bodies, what information
   would be provided from the questionnaires in the confirmation
   process.  Two specific decisions were made, and worked well.

   The questionnaires were explicitly and clearly labeled as to what
   information would be provided to the confirming bodies, and what
   would be kept confidential to the nominating committee itself.  It
   was concluded based on prior years that clear communication about the
   expectation that most of the information would be shared with the
   confirming body was necessary.

   The nominating committee debated what was the best way to ask for
   private information.  The decision was that a single question at the
   end of each questionnaire would ask for further input not to be
   shared with the confirming bodies.  This allowed folks to tell the
   NomCom what they thought was important while clearly allowing the
   NomCom to share enough information with the confirming body to help
   them perform their job.


4.  Collection of Feedback

   The nominating committee can not evaluate the nominees on its own.
   The 10 volunteers, even with the help of the liaisons, simply do not
   know all the people, or all the relevant information even about the
   people they individually know.  Community feedback is an essential
   part of the process.

   In order to get this feedback, the nominating committee reviews the
   nominees, and then sends out requests for feedback.  These requests



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   must be done in a fashion that complies with the confidentiality
   rules in place.  The practice that has developed is to send the
   request to a list of people who may have useful information.  The
   list includes not just people under serious consideration, but also
   some number of folks who are not being considered, typically because
   they are not willing or able to serve.  This padding is intended to
   provide some confidentiality to the actual process.

   In some cases, because the list of nominees was very long, the
   committee also made a first pass at removing people from the list
   before soliciting feedback.  This is useful to help the community
   focus where it will do the most good.  But it has the drawback of
   requiring certain preliminary decisions (which can be changed later)
   before there really is sufficient information.

   It would probably have been useful if I could have found a good way
   to tell the community what constitutes helpful or unhelpful feedback.
   Helpful feedback is specific and clear.  "Person X did action Y which
   had benefit / drawback Z." This can be coupled with indications as to
   whether the commenter thinks this was isolated, or a pattern (for
   good or ill.)  General descriptions of patterns of positive or
   negative behavior are helpful, but nowhere near as helpful as
   specifics.  General comments like "A would make a good IAB member" or
   "how could you possibly consider B for that IESG slot?" are actually
   relatively unhelpful.  The NomCom process is not voting, and the
   committee does not count support.  While it means something if
   several vague positive notes are received, and no negative ones, it
   does not actually help the committee evaluate whether this person
   would make a better or worse candidate than some other nominee.
   Another common kind of response that is less helpful on its own is
   simple ranked lists of nominees.  If coupled with feature
   descriptions ("I prefer L to M because of property N" then such lists
   gain some value.

   In keeping with the confidentiality rules, one of the properties of
   the tool is that a person will never see their own name on the list
   of names on which feedback is solicited.  This is to avoid telling
   the person whether they are, or are not shortlisted.  It is presumed
   that the individual is capable of providing feedback on themselves
   anyway.  As noted below, this particular piece of opacity does not
   work.  Folks can just ask around, find someone else they know who has
   also solicited, and usually find out if their name was on the list.
   (Yes, it can be argued that the confidentiality rules tell people not
   to relay that sort of information.  But since we know from individual
   reports that this happens frequently, the reality seems more relevant
   than the theory.)





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5.  Candidate Selection Process

   The process of selecting candidates for confirmation, and then
   working with the confirming body, is a complex and mostly
   confidential one.  It is the nominating committee chair's job to find
   a process which will work, and then shepherd it through to
   completion.

   The nominating committee used many different tools, with
   conversations (both voice and email) being the most important one.
   At various points, selection processes were applied to individuals or
   slates of individuals.  When explicit votes were needed, preferential
   ballots were used, with resolution based on Condorcet voting with
   Instant-runoff voting (IRV) for resolving those situations where
   Condorcet was inconclusive.  (These techniques are described in many
   web sites, and references were provided to the committee as part of
   the process of agreeing to use this resolution mechanism.  I do not
   know how authoritative any one site is, so the reader is advised to
   search on their own if they are interested in more details on
   preferential voting resolution methods and their pluses and minuses.)
   This was managed through open source tools, and proved quite
   effective.

   Candidates were selected, approved by confirming bodies, and their
   willingness and availability verified by a few days after the RFC
   specified February 22nd deadline.


6.  Issues

   A number of issues of various types were encountered during the
   nominating committee process.  As a rule of thumb, it seems the best
   thing a nominating committee chair can do when planning the schedule
   is to assume things will go wrong.  So push the schedule hard even
   when it looks like there is plenty of time.  You will need it.

   The following sections describe some of the issues which in my
   personal opinion, based on what I observed, should be kept in mind in
   working with the process.  It is my recommendation that some of these
   issues be addressed by changes in the defined processes.

6.1.  Volunteer exclusion

   One of the first items of confusion was when it was noticed that the
   spirit of the exclusion from eligibility to serve on the NomCom and
   the letter of the law do not match.  The spirit is that folks serving
   on bodies to which the NomCom is making appointments shall not
   themselves be volunteer members of the NomCom.  The letter of the law



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   lists the IAB and IESG.  It does not list the IAOC.

   One volunteer realized after he volunteered that as a sitting IAOC
   member, he should not be a volunteer member of the NomCom.  So he
   politely asked to remove himself from the list.  I removed him.  But
   the letter of the law ought to match the intent.  Until it does,
   NomCom chairs should keep an eye open for this potential
   inconsistency.  If the defining documents are revised for any reason,
   the text there should be repaired as well.

6.2.  Liaison participation

   As mentioned earlier, I, as chaired worked out with the confirming
   bodies and the liaisons the rules for the liaison participation in
   the NomCom.  The goal of this was to enable the liaisons to provide
   useful input while avoiding the reported historical problems of some
   liaisons in some years having too much influence in the deliberation
   process.  There is distinct ambiguity in the written rules as to the
   intended and desired scope of participation by the liaisons in the
   NomCom discussions.

   As per the rules, and in order to permit the liaisons to be present
   for as much of the discussion as possible, the liaisons were
   permitted to participate in the discussions of how often we met or
   held phone calls, and when such activities occurred.

   The terms of participation in the discussion of individuals and
   positions were designed to allow useful information, while preventing
   excess.
   o  Liaisons are always permitted to provide information from the
      bodies they represent, and to answer questions about those bodies
   o  Liaisons are permitted to provide, during email, phone, or face to
      face discussions, factual information that they know personally
      that they feel is helpful to the committee
   o  Liaisons are permitted and encouraged to use the same tools the
      community uses to provided opinions, feedback, or other
      information to the committee.
   o  Liaisons were prohibited from providing personal opinions in the
      discussions of nominees.

6.3.  Nominee List Confidentiality

   The RFCs defining the NomCom process require that all information,
   including the lists of nominees, who has accepted nomination, and the
   lists of who is under actual consideration by the nominating
   committee, be kept confidential.  While this is an attractive rule,
   it has resulted in a major problem and I believe needs to be revised.




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   As described above, the nominating committee needs information from
   the community.  To comply with current rules a padded set of names is
   sent to a portion of the community for feedback.  This has multiple
   problems.  First and foremost, it does not achieve the objective.
   Folks will learn if they are on the list being solicited.  With the
   number of people who see the list, folks who want to know can find
   out who is on the list.  (People are people, and they will talk to
   each other.  Pretending otherwise is unrealistic.  Hundreds of people
   do not keep a secret.)  And people will determine who the pads are.
   Many times, no matter how hard the committee works, it will be
   obvious which names are padding.

   As a minor point, the padding is extra work.  The committee has to
   come up with credible names that they think won't be well known as
   having turned down the nomination.  And then the chair really should
   check with those folks before using them as padding.  I made some
   mistakes in that regard, and it caused some people difficulty.

   The most important reason for removing the confidentiality of the
   nominees list is that the current process prevents the most important
   source of input.  The community members who are not the leadership,
   the grass roots if you will, are the people who may well know
   important and useful information about nominees, but are not going to
   be solicited, much less interviewed.  One of the main points of this
   nominating committee process is to avoid having the leadership self-
   appoint.  Having a large portion of the community know the list of
   nominees, and another large portion not know the list, is counter to
   the goals.

   My personal recommendation would be that the list of all individuals
   who have accepted nomination for any given position be available
   publicly starting 24 hours after the initial solicitation of
   nominees.  This should include the individual, affiliation, and
   position, but no information as to where the nomination came from.
   Incumbents should be treated as anyone else in terms of listing,
   listing them when they have agreed to be considered as nominees.
   Treating the incumbents any differently from other folks would merely
   confuse the feedback.

6.4.  The IAB Roles

   Appointment of members to the IAB (either new members, or
   reappointment of existing members) is an important part of the
   nominating committee job.  This year there was a complication in this
   task.  As far as the nominating committee could determine, the
   community at large had very little understanding of what the IAB did,
   or what made a good or bad IAB member.  There was also, for a variety
   of reasons, very little documentary evidence as to what individual



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   participants in the IAB had done in that role.  This was further
   complicated by confusion in the community, and possibly on the
   nominating committee, as to what actions were just a person being a
   good IETF member, and what actions were a person being a positive IAB
   member.  It is presumed that the two are not interchangeable.

   Part of what made this particularly complex is that the issue was not
   about whether the IAB is a positive part of the IETF.  The community
   sees the IAB as an important and positive part of the IETF.  But when
   asked to take that a step further, into the details which affect the
   selection process, there was significant difficulty.

6.5.  Multiple Leaders from a Company

   For many very good reasons, the IETF does not have strict rules on
   how many people from a company may serve on the IAB or IESG (or
   IAOC.)  At the same time, it is understood by the nominating
   committee that having a large number of people from one company on
   any given body is not a good idea.

   The only reason this is even an issue is that when it comes time to
   decide, different members of the NomCom, and of the community, will
   weight this differently.  That too is fine.  It is merely important
   to understand that this is a legitimate issue for nominating
   committee members to consider.

   There is a potential side-issue, which I would also prefer not result
   in an additional rule.  The nominating committee rules cover the
   affiliations of the volunteers.  They do not count the affiliation of
   the liaisons or the chair.  It would probably be a good idea for
   those bodies appointing liaisons to keep an eye open for extreme
   cases.  It would be awkward to have a committee with two volunteers,
   two liaisons, and a chair all from the same company.  It would not
   violate the letter of the rules, but would certainly be seen as
   unfortunate.

6.6.  ADs and chairs

   One of the topics that came up this year is the policies with regard
   to ADs and chairs.  As with other things, this is a matter where the
   nominating committee must judge the temper of the community.  The
   conclusions described here are this years committees understandings
   of the community view.  There are two loosely related issues.

   The first is the question of ADs serving as working group chairs.
   This can occur across areas, or within an area.  The sense we
   understood from the community is that even across areas this is not a
   good idea.  ADs serving as chairs clearly have much more influence



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   with their Area Director, and as such weaken the checks and balances
   of the system.  Within their own area, even with their co-AD serving
   as responsible AD, this is seen as even more of a bad idea.
   Obviously, there are transition situations (it takes time to find new
   chairs) and special situations ("I thought it was done already") that
   complicate any hard rule.  But as a sense of the community, this
   seemed to this committee to be a bad idea.  It is not clear where,
   other than this sort of document, these observations about "bad
   practices" can be recorded to assist future activities.

   A much subtler and more nuanced situation is the way that various ADs
   go about picking chairs for working groups.  It is very common for
   ADs to want to pick chairs that they can work with.  It makes life
   MUCH easier.  This does however have a tendency to center the pool of
   chairs in an area around a few small groups.  Some ADs have used
   public calls for nominations as a way to counter this trend.  Such
   public calls often bring forward names that the AD would not have
   considered who are strong, capable individuals.  Sometimes even more
   complex canvassing for good chairs is needed, particularly when the
   working group has a complex set of constraints it needs to work
   within.


7.  IANA Considerations

   There are no IANA Considerations in this document, as no computer
   protocols are discussed, and no code points assigned.  This section
   may be removed by the RFC Editor.


8.  Security Considerations

   This is a report on an activity that occurred.  Every effort has been
   made to respect the mandatory confidentiality aspects of that
   activity.  Some of the proposals in this document would change those
   properties, and such effect are clearly an important part of the
   consideration of such changes.  It is the author's view that the
   trade-off would be to the benefit of the community.

   The NomCom this year followed the practices of the last several years
   with regard to managing information confidentiality.  The archives of
   the comments, questionnaires, and other email to the committee are
   stored encrypted on a server manage by Henrik, with the decryption
   key known to the committee members.  Distribution of that private key
   used a private password protected web site, with the password
   provided to committee members by phone.  If the committee can be
   organized before the second face-to-face IETF meeting of the year,
   the decryption key can be distributed manually at that meeting.



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Internet-Draft         2008-9 NomCom Chair report             April 2009


9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

   [RFC3777]  Galvin, J., "IAB and IESG Selection, Confirmation, and
              Recall Process: Operation of the Nominating and Recall
              Committees", BCP 10, RFC 3777, June 2004.

9.2.  Informative References

   [RFC3797]  Eastlake, D., "Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee
              (NomCom) Random Selection", RFC 3797, June 2004.


Author's Address

   Joel M. Halpern (editor)
   Ericsson
   P. O. Box 6049
   Leesburg, VA  20178
   US

   Email: jhalpern@redback.com




























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