Subject: How confidential is the information we share with the Nomcom?

From: Lakshminath Dondeti <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:59:27 -0800

Confidentiality and the Nomcom has always been an interesting topic 
to me.  Some want everything to be secretive.  I think that the more 
stuff we try to keep secret the harder it is.  Personally, the holy 
grail is potential negative feedback the community may want to 
provide to the nomcom.  In some instances that feedback has been used 
to unseat someone and in other cases just to be packaged as feedback 
to the I* member in question.  If we lose the potential to get/give 
negative feedback without possible repercussions, more people are 
willing to share such opinions.  That's the objective anyway.

It might be worthwhile for the community to know the feedback is known to

* the voting members of the nomcom
* nomcom current and past year's chair
* the 3 liaison members
* the tools team  (some of them are IETF contributors)
* whoever maintains the nomcom list archives
* ???

Frankly the feedback does not need to seen by anyone other than the 
voting members IMO.  What do others think?

thanks,
Lakshminath

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 05:12:11 +0100

> * whoever maintains the nomcom list archives

"The tools team" is a bit broad, of course a Web server with a
HTML form sending mail has an admin.  Like a Web server with a
mail archive.      

> Frankly the feedback does not need to seen by anyone other
> than the voting members IMO.  What do others think?

In theory.  In practice I don't see how you can get rid of the
admins.  For any nominations I hope that you ask ??? if they
consider to volunteer, if the nomination passed a giggle test.

It's probably not necessary that they know who nominated them,
or is it ?  Ditto the liaisons.

Frank

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:10:26 -0800

on 2006-11-05 18:59 Lakshminath Dondeti said the following:

[snip first part of message]

> It might be worthwhile for the community to know the feedback is known to

[snip other parties]

> * the tools team  (some of them are IETF contributors)

This is incorrect.  The feedback is encrypted (with the nomcom's public
key) before being committed to disk, and only the nomcom has the private
key necessary to decrypt and read the feedback.  The design of this is
very explicitly done so that nobody who doesn't have the nomcom's private
key can read the feedback.

Where did this erroneous information about the tools team having access
to the feedback come from?

	Henrik

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From: Lakshminath Dondeti <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:33:37 -0800

At 08:12 PM 11/5/2006, Frank Ellermann wrote:
>admins.

The nomcom chair could maintain the email server and the nomcom chair 
can also continue to serve as the anonymizer.  This will include the 
nomcom chair in the list of people who one might be comfortable to 
share that information with.

If voting members are the only ones who should be allowed to see the 
feedback and the nomination information, then we may have to change 
how we select the nomcom chair.

The other option is to use admins who don't care about the 
IETF.  They are not interested in the information and it is not 
really worth a whole lot on the open market so to speak.

regards,
Lakshminath

>For any nominations I hope that you ask ??? if they

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From: Lakshminath Dondeti <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:46:07 -0800

I am not (yet) going to get into who specifically has access to what 
kind of information and how, but instead asking a meta question about 
whether or not people care about confidentiality, and to what extent.

I would also like to bring back the attention to the subject of my 
email "the information we share with the Nomcom" whatever kind it is, 
nominations, feedback, advise etc.  What should be confidential and 
what doesn't need to be?

regards,
Lakshminath

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 01:47:50 -0800

> voting members IMO.  What do others think?

So your point is that the chair of the nominating committee should  
not know who the candidates are?

You might consider the text in sections 4(3) and 5(9) of RFC 3777:

---------------------------

    3.  The nominating committee comprises at least a Chair, 10 voting
        volunteers, 3 liaisons, and an advisor.

---------------------------

    9.  All members of the nominating committee may participate in all
        deliberations.

        The emphasis of this rule is that no member can be explicitly
        excluded from any deliberation.  However, a member may
        individually choose not to participate in a deliberation.

---------------------------

I think the folks who want to comment in this thread should consider  
carefully how the nomination committee would manage to function if  
the advisor, liaisons, and chair, who are present in the discussions  
but do not vote, were not permitted to know the names of the  
individuals under discussion, and how they would respond to questions  
put to them regarding the nomcom process. The reason that the IAB  
ratifies decisions on the IESG, the IESG on the IAOC, and the ISOC  
Board on the IAB, are to ensure that the processes followed are  
reasonable and normal, and the ratifying bodies ask their liaisons  
(who were present for the discussions and observed the processes)  
questions regarding that.

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 19:55:01 +0100

Fred Baker wrote:
> So your point is that the chair of the nominating committee should  not 
> know who the candidates are?
> 

Exactly. That is the inner scope of the confidentiality for all
matters. There's an outer scope, because the Nomcom also solicits
input on candidates  from whomever it chooses to consult, and naturally
those people (a) know the names they are asked to comment on and (b) are
bound by confidentiality about those names.

I don't see any ambiguity in the rules.

     Brian

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From: Lakshminath Dondeti <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:57:11 -0800

At 06:59 PM 11/5/2006, Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:
>provide to the nomcom.  In some instances that feedback has been 
>used to unseat someone and in other cases just to be packaged as 
>feedback to the I* member in question.  If we lose the potential to 
>get/give negative feedback without possible repercussions, more 
>people are willing to share such opinions.  That's the objective anyway.
>

Correction:  Apparently, the feedback cannot be seen by the tools 
team.  What they do know is who nominated whom.  That still concerns 
me, of course.

I apologize if this was seen as a misrepresentation of the 
facts.  The way I see it though is that the process and the 
mechanisms were not discussed within the community.  Conventional 
wisdom says that security protocols/mechanisms designed without 
proper peer review tend to be broken.  A few people I have spoken to 
seem to think that the notion of the tools team knowing who nominated 
whom is not acceptable,

All told however, based on the traffic related to this thread, the 
community does not seem to quite care about who knows what was said 
in the nomcom, generally speaking.  Is that the case?

regards,
Lakshminath

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:09:17 +0100

Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:

> The way I see it though is that the process and the mechanisms
> were not discussed within the community.  Conventional wisdom
> says that security protocols/mechanisms designed without proper
> peer review tend to be broken.  A few people I have spoken to
> seem to think that the notion of the tools team knowing who
> nominated whom is not acceptable,

It's always good to check privacy issues, but please don't get
carried away.  It's the job of the tools team to develop new
tools.  When they're ready these tools could be hosted by the
IETF secretariat (or elsewhere, you proposed the Nomcom Chair).

The tool has to be tested, it already turned out that some less
usual browsers don't like RFC 2617, but could handle Auth Basic
over https (one hopes).

And maybe the "loginmgr" tool could be extended to some OpenID
concept later, integrated into other tools - I-D submission by
upload is an idea.

At the moment folks can also still send their comments etc. by
mail, then they never touch the tools server.  One disadvantage
with that approach is that I never know if the feedback arrived,
all I see is "waiting for moderation".

And of course a Web form can enforce some minimal structure for
the feedback, with ordinary mail what you get can be anything -
maybe a *.doc file and you have no way to read it.  Or some
anti-spam mechanism on overdrive deletes it before you see it.
The sender would never know that it vanished in a black hole.

> the community does not seem to quite care about who knows what
> was said in the nomcom, generally speaking.  Is that the case?

I'm interested, but not worried.  Your info how it's handled
could be integrated into a privacy statement for this particular
Web form.  Maybe the tools list is a better place to discuss
technical details.

Frank