Subject: Re: Final Announcement of Qualified Volunteers

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 09:31:55 -0400

--On Saturday, July 06, 2013 14:53 -0700 NomCom Chair 2013
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> I am pleased to announce that we have 140 qualified
> individuals who  have generously volunteered to serve as
> voting members of this year's  Nomcom.

Allison,

Given my previous comment about statistical assertions, a quick
look at this list sheds some additional light on cross-sections
of the community.  

(1) While you have 140 people from whom to do a random draw, the
"no more than two volunteers with the same primary affiliation"
(RFC 3777, Section 4, Bullet17) rule means that the actual nomcom
pool is only 81 even though some of the people are indeterminate
(I've made some assumptions about company boundaries -- other
assumptions would yield very slightly different results).  That
number is obtained by listing the companies and then counting
any company with more that two volunteers as having only two.  

Neither the 140 number nor the 81 number is incorrect, they just
measure different things.

(2) Four companies account for 44.3% of the volunteers.  As
others have pointed out, while having a very large number of
volunteers cannot produce more than two Nomcom voting seats due
to that restriction, it can virtually guarantee (statistical
randomness notwithstanding) that one will end up with one or two
seats.  Specifically, if the people selected constitute a
cross-section of the volunteers, then more than 10% of the pool
(14 volunteers) would predict to at least one seat.  Two
companies exceed that number and a third is very close.
Randomness could make the actual numbers either better or worse,
but, if an organization's goal were to assure at least one seat,
that seems easily accomplished.  Of course, having lots of
volunteers doesn't imply that an organization was trying to
accomplish any such thing -- it could just have a lot of
public-spirited IETF participants and policies that allow people
to commit the time.

(3) It is probably too late to even discuss it for this year
(see below) but it occurs to me that, if one wanted to minimize
the odds of organizations trying to game the nomcom selection
process, it would be rational to do a two step draw, first
randomly selecting two volunteers from any organization offering
more than two and then including only those two in the final
selection process.    On the other hand, that would give you
around 81 candidates for the final selection this year.  If
running the final selection against order 140 people rather than
order 81 causes the community to believe that it has a better
sample, then that option probably would not be appropriate.  I
am not, however, convinced that we would actually have consensus
for minimizing those odds, nor about whether a company's ability
to nearly guarantee that at least one of its employees will be
on the Nomcom by providing a large fraction of the volunteers
violates the provision of Section 4, bullet 16, of RFC 3777
requiring "...unbiased if no one can influence its outcome in
favor of a specific outcome".

Actually, if I read Bullet 16 correctly, the choice of methods
is up to you, with RFC 2777 (and 3797) being just examples. So,
in theory, you could make that change.  I wouldn't personally
recommend it, but you are the one who has personal
responsibility for things being fair and unbiased while this is
just a statistical exercise for me.

best,
   john

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 13:49:55 +0000

I find the presumption that IETF attendees employed by companies that send large number of attendees are robots to be somewhat distasteful.   It also doesn't match my experience.   I am sure that _some_ attendees from large companies are just as partisan as you fear, but some are not.   So I am not convinced that your proposal would have a good outcome.

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 09:59:42 -0400

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:31 AM, John C Klensin <[email-masked]> wrote:
> if one wanted to minimize
> sample, then that option probably would not be appropriate.

The sample is better at 140 if individuals represent themselves, but
not if they are swayed by their organizational affiliation, and
organization is now a significant factor in what we can expect from
volunteers -- not all, but even some of those from organizations where
the volunteers are long time participants.  I support this idea.  I
think the gain is greater than the loss, and it even fosters
diversity.

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 12:10:54 -0400

--On Tuesday, July 09, 2013 13:49 +0000 Ted Lemon
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> I find the presumption that IETF attendees employed by
> companies that send large number of attendees are robots to be
> somewhat distasteful.   It also doesn't match my experience.
> I am sure that _some_ attendees from large companies are just
> as partisan as you fear, but some are not.   So I am not
> convinced that your proposal would have a good outcome.

It was _not_ a proposal, merely an analysis of the numbers and
an exploration of alternatives.

I also didn't say "robots" or anything that could be reasonably
construed as robots.  I don't even have any experience that
would lead to expect that a company would expect any selected
Nomcom members to march in lockstep.

I do note that the "no more than two people with the same
primary affiliation" rule is part of RFC 3777 (BCP 10) and take
that as an indication that the community was unhappy with at
least the appearances of one company having more than 1/5 of
Nomcom voting membership.  That limit is not part of any
proposal I or, to my knowledge, others have made recently.  With
regard to that limit, my analysis is merely an exploration of
how the intent of that rule might best be satisfied.

I'd welcome a discussion of whether the analysis is correct or
not. You might reasonably believe that it is irrelevant.  But,
as far as disagreeing with a proposal or not, please wait until
someone makes one (fwiw, it won't be me).

    john

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 08:40:50 +1200

> (2) Four companies account for 44.3% of the volunteers.

OK, but what would X be in "Four companies account for X% of
people eligible to volunteer"?

That said, the "not more than two from the same employer" rule
was written in anticipation of a theoretical problem; it seems
that it was a good idea, but it does allow the following to become
true: "Four companies account for 67% of the NomCom members."

Should we consider changing it to "not more than one" in view
of today's data?

Regards
   Brian

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 13:53:58 -0700

> Should we consider changing it to "not more than one" in view

On it's face, that sounds like an absolutely Draconian rule.

However stepping back a bit, it should prompt a simple question:  Is the 
IETF so reliant on a tiny number of companies that we cannot produce 
viable committees if we require each member of a committee to be 
affiliated with a different company?

In other words, are we really incapable of requiring extensive corporate 
diversity?

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 16:58:40 -0400

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Dave Crocker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> IETF so reliant on a tiny number of companies that we cannot produce viable
> committees if we require each member of a committee to be affiliated with a
> different company?
>

Is the great majority of the wisdom in the IETF incorporated into a
few megacorporations?

(That might reflect market share, in which case, is it a problem?)

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 21:07:23 +0000

> (That might reflect market share, in which case, is it a problem?)

I don't know the answer to that question, but it's an interesting question.   But the reason I reacted to John Klensin's message earlier the way I did is that I think that the question of how biased toward the company's goals a nomcom participant will be has a lot to do with the individual candidate.   And large companies do seem to tend to snap up long-time influential IETF participants, so indeed it is likely that over time IETF knowledge will tend to concentrate in one large company or another.

That being the case, the current two-person rule could as easily be argued to be damaging to the process as beneficial to it.   I'm not making a claim either way, but I think that absent statistically valid data, this discussion is completely theoretical.

---

From: Yoav Nir <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 21:37:07 +0000

On Jul 10, 2013, at 12:07 AM, Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
 wrote:

> I don't know the answer to that question, but it's an interesting question.   But the reason I reacted to John Klensin's message earlier the way I did is that I think that the question of how biased toward the company's goals a nomcom participant will be has a lot to do with the individual candidate.  

I think that before we discuss the extent of the bias, we should explore the question of whether such bias matters. Phrased as a question, how much can a nomcom member (or a pair of them) do to advance a company's goals? I've heard that nomcom members recuse themselves from discussions of candidates from their own company, so company X can't hope to get its employees appointed as ADs by stuffing the nomcom with other employees. Well, unless there's a huge back-room conspiracy among several such companies. 

Company X might have a bunch of technologies that they want to bring to the IETF to get them rubber-stamped as standards track RFCs, and they might want to see to it that ADs that will be trouble-makers don't get elected. That might even work (a single member is much more able to prevent someone being appointed than to cause someone to be appointed) But such proposals could be defeated in working groups and at IETF last call long before they even reach the IESG. I just don't see the benefit justifying the effort.

Yoav

---

From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:41:12 -0700

At 06:49 09-07-2013, Ted Lemon wrote:
>I find the presumption that IETF attendees employed by companies 
>that send large number of attendees are robots to be somewhat 
>distasteful.   It also doesn't match my experience.   I am sure that 
>_some_ attendees from large companies are just as partisan as you 
>fear, but some are not.   So I am not convinced that your proposal 
>would have a good outcome.

I fixed the nomcom-chair-2013 email address as it does not make sense 
to send an email to an invalid address.

When designing a random selection a person has to ensure that the 
selection is such that the unbiased nature is publicly 
verifiable.  As John Klensin mentioned "four companies account for 
44.3% of the volunteers".  A similar question was raised by Sam 
Hartman previously.  When I looked at the affiliations over the years 
I noticed that two companies can easily get 40% of the vote.

The IETF works on the presumption of good faith.  Would a significant 
number of attendees from large companies adopt a partisan 
approach?  It's difficult for the public to determine that.  I'll 
change the question: does anyone believe that the average attendee 
from a large company will take a decision which is in the interest of 
the IETF Community even though that decision conflicts with what 
would be in the interest of the company?

That's not the better question though.  What is NomCom about?  The 
possible answers are not in the RFCs.

Anyway, the initial message was about having a broad pool and doing 
an unbiased selection from it.  The pool may have less people but it 
is broader in the sense that there would be people from all walks of 
the IETF.  I think that's what Jari Arkko might be referring to when 
he writes the word "inclusive".

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

---

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 14:52:55 -0700

> That being the case, the current two-person rule could as easily be argued to be damaging to the process as beneficial to it.   I'm not making a claim either way, but I think that absent statistica…

Dear Ted,

From my experience, some projects have been thwarted through actions of a few companies.  The direction taken ended up being doomed which may have been the ultimate goal and potentially represents a real fairness issue IMHO.

Regards,
Douglas Otis

---

From: Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 17:58:10 -0500

On 7/9/2013 8:59 AM, Scott Brim wrote:
> think the gain is greater than the loss, and it even fosters diversity. 

I don't have a lot of time to chat about this, but

- I agree with Scott that it matters what voting members are guided by 
(organization, personal experience, intuition, flipping coins ...)
- I suspect that it's not possible to predict what any 10 voting members 
chosen at random will be guided by
- I'm not sure we can even know what the 10 voting members *were* guided 
by, unless the behavior is so bad that the advisor freaks out or the 
chair tells us in the plenary Nomcom report

If people want to think about the Nomcom volunteer pool, it may be 
useful to wonder about whether the perspective of voting members from 
more organizations would help the Nomcom make better choices.

Of course, I'm not sure we can predict that, either :-)

Spencer

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 13:23:03 -1000

Spencer Dawkins wrote:

> - I'm not sure we can even know what the 10 voting members *were*
>   guided by, unless the behavior is so bad that the advisor freaks out
>   or the chair tells us in the plenary Nomcom report

and Yoav Nir wrote:

> how much can a nomcom member (or a pair of them) do to advance a
> company's goals?

< reality check >

the ietf is no longer a collegiate collection of engineers, computer
scientists, and operators.  sad to say, we need to get past that fantasy
of the good old days.  and i would point out that traditional SDOs are
generally users trying to get multi-vendor interoperability and choice,
not vendors throwing weight proportional to market share.

but physics says we do this in an environment which is dominated by the
vendors being the ones who can afford the cost to have a strong presence
in the ietf, see <http://archive.psg.com/051000.ccr-ivtf.html>.

and i believe that there is a real problem, not just fud and theory.

i *heard* (from reliable sources, plural, but not witnssed) that there
was a nomcom where company X said that an employee of X must be chosen
for the iesg or <very negative financial and political consequences>
would ensue.

randy

---

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 16:30:49 -0700

On Jul 9, 2013, at 3:58 PM, Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> The sample is better at 140 if individuals represent themselves, but not if they are swayed by their organizational affiliation, and organization is now a significant factor in what we can expect from volunteers -- not all, but even some of those from organizations where the volunteers are long time participants. I support this idea. I think the gain is greater than the loss, and it even fosters diversity. 
> 
> - I agree with Scott that it matters what voting members are guided by (organization, personal experience, intuition, flipping coins ...)
> - I suspect that it's not possible to predict what any 10 voting members chosen at random will be guided by
> - I'm not sure we can even know what the 10 voting members *were* guided by, unless the behavior is so bad that the advisor freaks out or the chair tells us in the plenary Nomcom report
> 
> If people want to think about the Nomcom volunteer pool, it may be useful to wonder about whether the perspective of voting members from more organizations would help the Nomcom make better choices.
> 

Dear Spencer,

Precisely because it is impossible to judge motivations, the only way to ensure fairness is to ensure broad participation.  It seems unfortunate an organization dedicated to developing the Internet has not done more to ensure those obtaining remote access are not treated as second class participants.  This should greatly increase the available talent.  The larger pool could be coupled with a meeting subscription to offset the loss of fees collected at meeting venues. 

To improve the experience, a flash based netbook coupled with the projector and PA could improve remote access into being much closer to a face-to-face experience worthy of fees requested.  Importantly, both face-to-face and remote participants should be able to obtain equal roles.  If the Internet is down, so is the meeting.  That may make venue selection more dependent upon the quality of the Internet availability.

Imagine real time translations made possible actually enhancing regional understanding.

Regards,
Douglas Otis

---

From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 19:43:04 -0400

Hi John,

Excuse me for replying to just part of your message below:

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:31 AM, John C Klensin <[email-masked]> wrote:
>...

The current two nomcom member per sponsor limit is really pretty much
of an honor system by self declaration. The Nomcom chair has no need
to bindingly determine what affiliation every volunteer has. Only as
nomcom members are selected does the Nomcom chair have to even think
about this. I think that, as a result, there are probably at most a
handful of cases where the Nomcom chair has to worry about this at all
including ambiguous cases such as someone working for a subsidiary of
a company that sponsors someone already selected for noncom or
consultations that nominally work for a separate organization but are
X% funded for their IETF work by BigCompany for various values of X.
Any "two step" rule as you suggest will move affiliation from a tail
end check designed to be sure that the nomcom passes the smell test to
the heart of the selection process. I think the result would be a
mess.

However, if such a system were adopted, its not like an upfront
selection to 2 per sponsor is the only alternative to the current
unlimited pool from which the noncom is selected. Just to give an
example of an alternative rule, since you have to classify all
volunteers as to who their sponsor is, you could do initially a select
among the V volunteers from sponsor S limited to the square root of V
rounded up. That would seem like a more moderate intermediate course.

> favor of a specific outcome".

In my opinion, those words, in the context of the previous sentence
which speaks of each volunteer being equally likely to be selected,
means influence in favor of a particular volunteer or the like.
(Although all volunteers are equally likely to be selected, the
selections are ordered and after two have been selected with the same
affiliate, subsequent selections with the same affiliation are
discarded and additional selection(s) made.)

> ...

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA
 [email-masked]

---

From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 20:05:20 -0400

Hi Brian,

> was written in anticipation of a theoretical problem; it seems

I think not. If I recall correctly, there was at least one noncom with
three voting members with the same affiliation. While there was no
particular evidence that these voting members were acting as other
than individuals, the consensus was that it just smelled bad and so
the limit of two per primary affiliation was adopted. (Also note that,
according to the records, the first two nomcoms had only 7 voting
members.)

Thanks,
Donald

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 01:23:47 +0100

I do recall a case where both chairs of a WG belonged to a Major Organization.

World domination was thwarted, however, because the chairs couldn't actually
agree on anything; the organization was big enough that competing views
were widespread within it.

Much to the frustration of other members of the Major Organization.
And the members of the working group.

This suggests that we can't produce viable committees _anyway_.

Lloyd Wood
http://sat-net.com/L.Wood/

________________________________________
From: [email-masked] [[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Dave Crocker [[email-masked]]
Sent: 09 July 2013 21:53
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Final Announcement of Qualified Volunteers

d/

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 18:23:03 -0700

> This suggests that we can't produce viable committees _anyway_.

As usual, what it suggests is that we think that individual 
counter-examples somehow refute basic, well-established principles.

d/

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 18:35:20 -0700

On 7/9/2013 2:07 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
>> Is the great majority of the wisdom in the IETF incorporated into
>> a few megacorporations?
>>
> I don't know the answer to that question, but it's an interesting
> question.   But the reason I reacted to John Klensin's message
> earlier the way I did is that I think that the question of how biased
> toward the company's goals a nomcom participant will be has a lot to
> do with the individual candidate.

Yes it does, but unfortunately that is irrelevant.

The concept of conflict of interest is not concerned with whether an 
individual's behavior is problematic, but whether there is an inherent 
tension amongst different interests for the person.  In other words, 
it's about the situational potential, not personal integrity.

There are two ways to deal with conflict of interest.

The first is to prohibit it.  If a person has competing situational 
influences, they are excluded.

In many environments -- and especially ones with industry participants 
doing industry work, like a standards body -- it is not possible to 
create a 'neutral' situation.  So the alternative is to 'balance' things 
through diversity, ensuring that the situational forces pull in many 
different directions.  (Actually, this also means we ought to mean we 
limit the number of router vendors or MTA vendors or... in positions of 
control for individual committees.)

> And large companies do seem to
> tend to snap up long-time influential IETF participants, so indeed it
> is likely that over time IETF knowledge will tend to concentrate in
> one large company or another.

Trends towards industry concentration are a long-standing challenge.  To 
the extent that the IETF wishes to continue to be inclusive, diversity 
pressures means it needs to limit the /ability/ of the giants to dominate.

Again, it has nothing to do with the motives or style of any of the 
giants.  It has to due with a requirement that others are assured equal 
opportunity to participate and influence.

d/

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 23:54:13 -0400

> Excuse me for replying to just part of your message below:

No problem.
I found your explanation helpful.    Two observations at the
risk of repeating myself....

(1) I did not make a proposal.  I did point out that there were
other possibilities within the general bounds of the "no more
than two" rule.  Beyond that, about as far as I'm willing to go
is to say that different mechanisms (the current ordered list,
selecting a company down to two candidates, your square root of
V alternate suggestion, and maybe some other things) each have
advantages and disadvantages and, probably, each optimizes for
something different or deals with a different marginal case.  I
suspect that, most of the time, the differences in practice are
likely to be trivial (or smaller).   But I haven't even tried to
do the analyses in large part because I think they would be much
too speculative.

(2) In response to Brian, you wrote...

> I think not. If I recall correctly, there was at least one
> noncom with three voting members with the same affiliation.
> While there was no particular evidence that these voting
> members were acting as other than individuals, the consensus
> was that it just smelled bad and so the limit of two ...

The "bad smell" issue is, IMO, far more important than any
discussions of whether people or organizations have misbehaved
or might misbehave in the future.  It is especially important
should we have another round of discussions about antitrust
policies because, for an SDO, the ability, even in principle,
for one organization or set of interests to dominate a body or
its leadership selection process can easily create a lawyer's
playground.  I don't think it would be wise to try to completely
eliminate that risk even if it were possible, but passing a
smell test is nonetheless important for multiple reasons.

best,
   john

---

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 08:52:01 -0700

Lloyd,

> And the members of the working group.

I can think of one company who uses to IETF to have internal arguments.  But at the same time, I can think of another company who is very aligned in how they participate in the IETF.  Many others are somewhere in between.  There isn't a single model here.

Bob

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 08:57:54 -0700

...
> I can think of one company who uses to IETF to have internal arguments.  But at the same time, I can think of another company who is very aligned in how they participate in the IETF.  Many others a…

Bob,

If one were doing a broad discussion about the role of the IETF within 
various organizations' operations, your point would be interesting.

For the current discussion, I suspect it's not all the relevant, since I 
understand this thread to be about the /potential/ for undue influence 
by an organization.  Anecdotes about the potential being exercised (or 
not) provide some seasoning to the discussion but do not affect the 
essence of the concern.

It doesn't matter whether that potential is exercised.  What matters is 
the exposure of the IETF to that potential and how the IETF can reduce it.

As with all security risks, the requirement is to anticipate them and 
protect against them, rather than wait to fix things afterwards...

d/