Subject: On publishing lists of nominees.

From: David Allan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 01:01:52 -0400

My 2 cents 

I'm going to approach this from the perspective of providing the NOMCOM with
the most information the soonest, and trusting the NOMCOM itself to do
reasonable things. There is only so much that a NOMCOM can go out and
obtain.

There are two phenomina I would like to avoid that I experienced on a
NOMCOM:
- disproportionate feedback on some individuals due to limited distribution
of knowledge of nomination.(a.k.a campaigning, where the current arrangement
magnifies the damage via the "security via obscurity" nature of the
process).
- disproportionate influence of "insiders" on the NOMCOM due to the lack of
other sources of information.

IMHO the solution to this is publish the nominee list ASAP in the process to
solicit feedback. My initial thought is to list individuals prior to
acceptance of their nomination as this gives the NOMCOM more ammunition for
arm twisting if required, and may diffuse the feedback recevied (as opposed
to more rabid, knee jerk reactions any steps further into the process). 

The best check and balance on the process is to have the NOMCOM as informed
as possible, rather than not trusting the NOMCOM and engineering additional
last minute peer reviews once they've done the best they could with what
they had. 

cheers
Dave