Subject: A random sample of what? (was: Re: SUMMARY: should there be term limits?)

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 09:56:57 -0500

(Sorry -- I left a hanging partial sentence at the bottom of my
previous posting on this subject, which a couple of people have
been kind enough to point out.  The corrected message appears
below, but, for those who have read it, it is identical to the
previous posting with the terminal sentence fragment deleted.

One of those notes also suggested that my conclusion was not
clear.  It has two parts:

(i) To the extent that "random sample of the IETF community and
hence representative of it" would give the nomcom some special
virtue or authority, it doesn't represent such a sample and
hence does not have such virtue or authority as a result of that
source/argument.

(ii) Even with a nomcom that was more representative, the value
of checks and balances --including a serious and meaningful
review and confirmation process-- seems clear.  I'm not sure
whether such a process requires procedural changes or, as I
think Marshall is effectively suggesting, just a bit more
bravery on the part of the confirming bodies.

)

--On Friday, 29 March, 2002 22:54 -0500 "Joel M. Halpern"
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> One person objected to a stronger review saying roughly ~don't
> we trust the nomcom?~  The nomcom is a randomly selected set
> of people.  As such, they are people, and can make mistakes.
> A legitimate review of their result is helpful to the
> community, not a criticism of their work.

I suggest that, if we are going to think clearly about this
problem, we need to change our vocabulary a bit.  Participation
in the nomcom involves a good deal of very intense work over a
short period of time.  Just as many who participate usefully in
the IETF are unwilling, or unable due to other commitments, to
volunteer to be WG chairs, or document editors, not everyone has
been willing to volunteer to be on the nomcom.  In addition, we
prohibit any sitting IAB or IESG member from volunteering, and
essentially prohibit anyone who thinks he or she might better
serve the IETF community by getting onto the IESG or IAB from
volunteering.  We also exclude anyone whose participation in the
IETF, however effective, is exclusively by email.  And, of
course, people have commented in the past (perhaps not entirely
in jest) that they have volunteered for the nomcom in the hope
of guaranteeing that they will get on it and hence cannot be
tapped for the IESG or IAB.  

That combination of exclusion factors substantially guarantees
us a pool of volunteers from which the nomcom is chosen that not
statistically representative of the IETF participant community.
And the random selection process from that pool is, again
statistically, quite unlikely to represent a random sample of
either the IETF participant community or the IETF contributor
community (however one might try to define that).

We might even go further and argue that, logically and
statistically, the pool of those who volunteer to serve on the
nomcom consists of:

	(i) People with an exceptional sense of service and
	responsibility to the community who are also unwilling
	to be considered for an IESG or IAB seat (or who
	believe, correctly or incorrectly, that they would never
	be considered).
	
	(ii) People with axes to grind that give them sufficient
	motivation to serve and do the work, whether for or
	against some individual or for or against some particular
	strategy of populating particular Areas or the IESG or
	IAB in general.
	
	(iii) People who have no clue as to what they are
	getting themselves into.

Note that I do not claim that the latter two categories have any
members: they might be empty, but the categories are logically
necessary from the reasoning above.

But the nomcom membership is a random sample of that pool, not
of the IETF.  That sample may be exactly the right group to make
the selections.  It may be better than any other option we can
come up with.  It may even be the wrong group for many purposes,
but the one we deserve.    But it is _not_ a random sample of
the IETF community, and we should not make arguments about
nomcom wisdom based solely on nomcom representativeness.

         john