Re: Comments on Composition and Comportment of the IETF Nominating Committee draft

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 22:39 Russ Housley <[email protected]> wrote:

> Mallory:
>
>
> It would be worth interrogating the role of community feedback. Obviously
> this is a unique element and guidance for most hiring processes won’t
> have much to say about it. If we worry about discrimination in nomcom
> decision making we should probably worry about it in candidate feedback
> too. So what would be the fair mitigation? Giving a candidate the chance to
> rebut a potentially discriminatory feedback comment? Or not mentioning the
> comment during the interview at all, and giving the nomcom discretion to
> consider feedback in its own right to supplement its decision?
>
>
> Confidential community feedback to the NomCom is a vital part of the
> process.
>

Sure. But, is this process… working? There is no data.

(Other than abysmal gender representation.)

Why not conduct the interviews in a standard way and take in feedback as
supplemental. Without troubling the existence of feedback, which the
document doesn’t do by the way, I’m here to question whether interviews and
feedback as two parts of The Process necessarily be intertwined. Literature
says interviews should be standard across candidates.

-Mallory

The interview must be conducted in a manner that preserves the
> confidentiality of the feedback.  It is pretty easy for NomCom voting
> members to separate community comments that impact the "hiring" decisions
> from comments that are related to individual disagreement, whether they are
> technical disputes or personality conflicts.
>
> In may experience, NomCom have a set of questions that are identical for
> all candidates, and where appropriate there are candidate-specific
> questions are added at the end.
>
> Russ
>
>