[governance] civil society co ordination group - call for comments

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

The size of the volunteer pool matters.  The problem that historically plagues such a model is, you get essentially a much larger number of people favoring a particular ideology (from either side of the political spectrum) putting their names forward for consideration to be nomcom people.  And they end up rigging the process so that only a candidate that matches their views is selected.  

If there's a random selection, an imbalance in the number of people of a particular ideology that puts their name forward increases the chance that the final nomcom includes a non trivial number of people following that ideology.

This happened sometime in the 1980s when a hard left faction of the British Labour Party first pushed through a rule mandating that it would play a role in selecting and re-nominating MPs, and then managed to eject several moderates in favour of people that shared a hard left ideology.

--srs (iPad)

> On 20-Jan-2014, at 14:44, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> 
> I've already said and written many times that I'm in favor of setting
> up a Civil Society Joint NomCom process (with randomly selected
> voting members for each selection task), and this is still my opinion. 
> 
> 
> Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com> wrote about his personal experiences
> with NomComs:
> 
>> Only one of 9 had all members active
> 
> The original NomCom process, at IETF, has the requirement that people
> are included in the selection pool for the NomCom only if they “have
> attended at least 3 out of the last 5 IETF meetings.”
> 
> I think that the risk of a significant percentage of NomCom members
> being inactive can be significantly reduced by adopting some kind of
> analogous criterion. 
> 
>> most worked on the basis of only one or two active members.
> 
> I'm assuming that this remark is in the context of NomComs such as
> those used by IGC with only a small number of voting members (in IGC's
> case, only five).
> 
> I believe this problem has been reduced in IGC since the practice was
> adopted of including already in the random selection process the
> selection of “reserves” who would be called upon to replace people
> selected as voting members who then don't actually serve.
> 
> Another change that can be made to prevent that kind of problem is to
> increase the number of voting NomCom members that are appointed
> on the basis of the random selection.
> 
> The size of the volunteer pool, which may be limited in smaller
> communities, should not be an issue for a Civil Society Joint NomCom
> process.
> 
> IETF NomComs have ten randomly selected voting members, this is IMO a
> good number for a Civil Society Joint NomCom process also.
> 
> 
> Greetings,
> Norbert
> 
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