IETF J. Halpern
Internet-Draft Ericsson
Expires: June 25, 2010 December 22, 2009
Nominating Committee Tools Requirements
draft-halpern-nomcom-requirements-00.txt
Abstract
With the change in the rules for disclosure of nominees, the tools
that support the Nominating Committee need to change. Also, given
that some of these tools are critical to the Nominating Committee's
work, and have critical constraints, it is important to have a clear
description of the requirements.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Event Sequence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Necessary Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Highly Desired Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Useful Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
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1. Introduction
With the change in the rules for disclosure of nominees, the tools
that support the Nominating Committee (nomcom) need to change. Also,
given that some of these tools are critical to the nomcom's work, and
have critical constraints, it is important to have a clear
description of the requirements.
The document begins with a brief description of the general flow of
the processing by the nominating committee. This is included to give
context to the following discussions. It is by no means a complete
description of all the sequences of events which can occur.
Following that, there are three sections describing tool support.
The first of these describes the tool components that appear to be
necessary for the nominating committee to complete its job in the
current environment. The second describes tools which while not
strictly necessary, are highly desirable. The third section captures
some of the items that nominating committees would like to have
available.
It should be noted that there are existing tools, provided by highly
effective and valued volunteer labor, which provide many of these
needed functions. While the tools need not provide exactly the
current user interface, and may well operate differently under the
covers, the existing tools are a useful model for understanding how
some of these needs can be met.
2. Event Sequence
The sequence of events and actions, and the rules of operation of the
IETF Nominating committee (nomcom) are defined in [RFC3777] and
[RFC5680]. The following is a general description, to provide
context for the tools descriptions below.
The process starts with the naming of the Nominating Committee chair
by the ISoc President. The chair then lays out a time line, and
issues a call for volunteers for the nominating committee.
The chair collects volunteers, frequently issuing multiple
solicitations, as the larger the pool of qualified and willing
volunteers, the better. Upon completion, the list of volunteers is
published. The community is given a chance to challenge entries on
the list, and then a random selection of 10 volunteers is performed.
The community is given a chance to object, and then the nomcom is
constituted.
The committee begins by working out procedures, getting the list of
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openings, the job descriptions, the list of liaisons and adviser, and
performing initial organizational work.
Once the openings to be filled are known, the committee, via the
chair, issues a call for nominations. Anyone may nominate
individuals for positions. Nominations are for specific positions
(although the entire IAB is considered one "position", for which
multiple people will be selected. There is a list of IESG slots to
be filled, a number of IAB slots to be filled, and usually one IAOC
slot to be filled. The announcement usually includes the list of
incumbents. When nominations are received, the Nomcom chair is
responsible for contacting the nominee and determining if they are
willing to be considered for the position for which they have been
nominated. The list of nominees who have accepted nomination, and
the post or posts for which they have accepted nomination, are public
information.
In current practice, in parallel with the call for nominations the
nominating committee develops a questionnaire for the nominees.
Currently, there are three questionnaires, one for IAB nominations,
one for IAOC nominations, and one for an IESG nominations. Future
committees could create different questionnaires for each IESG slot,
or could use one questionnaire for all slots. Nominees are asked to
fill out their questionnaire by a given date. While committees will
generally be forgiving if asked for a little extra time, failure to
respond is usually considered grounds to disregard a nominee. The
questionnaire responses are confidential to the nominating committee.
Portions of them may be shared with the confirming body, depending
upon the procedures worked out between the Nomcom Chair and the
confirming bodies.
All email exchanged among or received by the committee needs to be
archived for review under certain circumstances. This archive, like
the questionnaire response, feedback, and other information received
by the committee must be handled with extreme care to ensure its
confidentiality. This is a personnel process.
At some point, the Nominating committee calls for feedback on
nominees. The exact time when this is done, and where these messages
are be sent, will need to be determined by the Nominating committee.
Traditionally, this has not happened until after the nominations were
closed, and was sent to a managed list of people in an effort to meet
the confidentiality requirements that used to exist relative to the
list of nominees. With the procedure change, described in [RFC5680],
it is probably practical to start collecting feedback as soon as the
first set of nominee names are made public.
The nominating committee will then undertake various processes
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(interviews, email questions of more people, arm-twisting to get
nominees, extensive discussion of substance and form among the
volunteers and chair, ... to come to a selection of candidates. It
is very common, along the way, for the committee to craft short-lists
for various positions.
At various points in this process, the Nomcom Chair will need to
confirm the willingness and availability to serve of nominees.
Depending upon the stage of the process this may vary from "are you
still interested and willing?" to "please confirm that you have
management support for the time commitment you have stated for this
job." This is mentioned here in case someone sees a way for tools to
be helpful to this part.
Once the candidates are selected, the Nomcom Chair writes up the
information about the selections, and sends the information to the
confirming body. There may be exchanges of email or other
discussions. There may be modifications of the list of candidates.
Eventually, a set of candidates is confirmed by the confirming body.
3. Necessary Tools
There must be an email list for the nominating committee work.
Anyone in the community must be able to send to this list. There
must be a confidential archive for this list. In addition to the
archive, the Chair, advisers, liaisons, and volunteer members of the
committee must receive email from this list.
Any feedback received by the nominating committee must be stored by
the tool with the same confidentiality as the email list itself.
There must be a tool for making the list of nominees who have
accepted nomination, and the position(s) for which they are willing
to be considered, visible to the IETF community.
There must be provision for repairing errors. Mistakes get made.
Certain repairs may require administrative privileges, but there has
to be some way to fix things.
Any and all changes to the data should be logged. Even repairs
should be logged, so that in the event of dispute there are ways to
determine exactly what happened. This log itself needs to be
confidential.
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4. Highly Desired Tools
It is extremely useful for the tools to provide explicit support
allowing any community member to provide feedback on any listed
nominee. This information should be recorded by the system and tied
to the person it is about, so as to make it easy for the nominating
committee to review all of the feedback about a given person.
If Feedback collection is provided by the tool, it needs to include
provision for attributed feedback that identifies the feedback author
(the normal case) and anonymous feedback. It is unclear at this time
whether the tool should itself anonymize the feedback, whether it
should send the feedback to the Chair for handling, or whether it
should be marked as anonymous, with provision for the chair to
determine who provided the information. In addition, the Chair and
the Adviser must be able to enter feedback either with or without
attribution to members of the community.
If there is tool support for collecting feedback, committee members
need to also be able to use that to create feedback (as well as, of
course, being able to review the feedback that is received.) In case
other members are asked to enter anonymous feedback, it would be
helpful if they could indicate that when entering feedback.
It can be helpful if the tools can assist the Nomcom Chair with the
processing of collecting nominees for positions. This includes
keeping track of who has been nominated, for what positions. For
each nominee/position pair, it should help send a confirmation, and
should track whether a confirmation or turn down has been received.
For those nominees who accept, if the committee chooses to use
questionnaires it would be helpful if the tool can track whether a
questionnaire response has been received.
As a general rule, it would be extremely helpful if information only
needed to be entered once. For example, If feedback is received as
email, and the system has recorded it as miscellany, it should be
possible to tell the system who this feedback is about, and have it
properly marked so that it is found when looking for feedback about
that person. Similarly, the list of nominees should be handled such
that there is no need to reenter people when they accept nomination,
and the committees view of nominees should be just a view into that
list. Similarly, if the tool assist with pruning lists during the
selection processes, these prunings should be marked (in ways that
affect what is seen by the nomcom but have no effect on what is seen
by the general community) so as to indicate those choices.
Having a suitably confidential Wiki has proven to be extremely
helpful to the nominating committee.
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5. Useful Tools
A method to easily collect the volunteers for the nominating
committee could be helpful to the Nomcom chair. This could be the
base for a simpler mechanism by which names are submitted to the
Secretariat for verification, and the verification (or lack there of)
is returned. This needs to allow for several corner cases if it is
done. The Chair and Secretariat may determine that an initially
invalid volunteer was actually valid. Or the reverse. Also, a
volunteer may withdraw for other reasons. If the system is to help
with this phase, it needs to allow for flexible updating of the data.
If the chair chooses to use [RFC3797], the tool could provide the
programmatic support for that. (Usage of such support should not be
mandatory, as some chairs will want to have stricter verification of
the random process. If tools support is provided for the volunteer
selection process, it must allow for the chair determining (either by
himself, or because of a protest) that certain individuals are
disqualified, for example if there are too many volunteers with the
same affiliation.
It would be helpful if the feedback collection tool allowed for and
encouraged feedback on areas and bodies (the IAB, the IETF as a
whole, ...) as well as on specific individuals.
Given that nomcom members can no longer be expected to recognize
every person in the community who gets nominated, it would be helpful
if the tool had provisions for additional information about the
person, such as a photograph, a web page link, or other such fields.
This could also be used to provide easy links to the original
nomination, the acceptance, and the questionnaire response provided
by the nominee.
If the tool is storing and presenting feedback to nomcom members, it
is helpful if the tool can present the information in multiple ways.
The current tool easily presents the feedback about each person, in
time sorted order. It could also be helpful to be able to look at
the most recent set of feedback received, across all the nominees.
(Currently, one has to open each and every nominee to find any new
feedback.)
During its deliberations, the nominating committee will frequently
craft lists of people of interest (short-lists) for particular slots.
It would be helpful if the tool could easily show the committee those
lists. Any such support would need to be confidential.
6. References
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6.1. 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.
[RFC5680] Dawkins, S., "The Nominating Committee Process: Open
Disclosure of Willing Nominees", BCP 10, RFC 5680,
October 2009.
6.2. Informative References
[RFC3797] Eastlake, D., "Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee
(NomCom) Random Selection", RFC 3797, June 2004.
Author's Address
Joel M. Halpern
Ericsson
P. O. Box 6049
Leesburg, VA 20178
US
Email: joel.halpern@ericsson.com
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