Nominating Committee Tools Requirements
Ericsson
P. O. Box 6049
Leesburg
VA
20178
US
joel.halpern@ericsson.com
General
IETF
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.
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.
The sequence of events and actions, and the rules of operation
of the IETF Nominating committee (nomcom) are defined in and . 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 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 , 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
(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.
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.
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.
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 ,
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.