Subject: Re: NomCom procedures revision

From: Samuel Weiler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2015 14:28:39 -0400 (EDT)

As a selecting member of the 2015-16 nomcom, I concur with Harald's 
general concerns re: voting mechanism and quorum confusion.

On Fri, 28 Aug 2015, Harald Alvestrand wrote:

> I suggest changing this to "Once established, the minimum threshold 
> for changing the procedure is 75% of the selecting volunteers".
>
> Note: The 75% acceptance criterion is new. 75% of the selecting
> volunteers is 8 people. That means that 3 people can a) block the
> acceptance of any procedure and b) (with my suggested change) prevent
> any change to the procedure. We should make sure that's what we want.

The document already allows other rules to be added and presumptively 
changed; it should allow the voting mechanism to change, too.  If 
nothing else, that lets a nomcom replace a 
clever-but-too-complicated-to-use mechanism after it realizes the 
error of its ways.

Picking the threshhold for change is hard.  Using whole numbers rather 
than percentages: if 3 out of the 10 selecting members are discontent 
with a process, should we allow 7 out of 10 to force it on them?  8 
out of 10 agreeing is a high bar, but it means that at most two 
selecting members are outliers, which might be a good bar.

I have no strong objections to requiring either 7 of 10 or 8 of 10.

> It is not at all clear what a "quorum" does. In our procedures work, 
> we found that separating out the idea of "meeting quorum" from 
> "voting quorum" made a lot of sense, espcially since we chose to do 
> secret ballots only - which means we can't do it in a meeting 
> anyway, and there was actually no requirement for the members of the 
> quorum to be present at the same time.

Another way of putting that is: this nomcom added a third kind of 
quorum - a quorum for holding a meeting.  We did not change the voting 
quorum rules; we just added another.  I'm not certain a meeting quorum 
is necessary as a general thing.  Maybe this document should just 
remind future nomcoms that they may wish too (and are allowed to) set 
a meeting quorum in addition to voting quorums prescribed in this 
document.

-- Sam