Re: ISSUE-133 - TAG role / makeup

On Tuesday 2015-03-10 19:17 +0000, Linss, Peter wrote:
> On Mar 10, 2015, at 2:34 AM, chaals@yandex-team.ru wrote:
> > 10.03.2015, 09:42, "Peter Linss" <peter.linss@hp.com>:
> >> What about a W3C member employing a member of the TAG nominating another person who is not an employee of that Member?
> > 
> > That's an explicit case I want to prohibit.
> 
> I don't see the benefit and think this would actually do more harm. We've actually had a case recently where an elected TAG member's employer's AC rep failed to enter a nomination in a timely manner, and the nomination was made by a competitor who already had a TAG member. There was no collusion between the W3C members nor the TAG members, and no favors were asked nor offered, it was just logistics. We'd have lost an effective TAG member with this rule in place.
> 
> I presume the point of this rule is to prevent a W3C member from "stuffing" the TAG with sympathetic, if not loyal, TAG members. As I pointed out before, rules like this are more about the possibility of harm than actual harm, and if a TAG member begins acting in bad faith, there are already procedures to remove them (i.e. don't re-elect them, though I wouldn't oppose adding a recall mechanism as well). There's nothing preventing TAG members from different organizations from colluding, regardless of where the nomination came from, in fact this has already happened in recent history with good effect. 
> 
> Furthermore, many W3C members are large organizations with many internal groups that don't always have the same agenda. I can easily imagine situations where an AC member refuses to nominate a qualified candidate due to internal politics.  Why leave the decision of who to nominate to W3C member internal processes instead of leaving it up to the AC in general?
> 
> Rather than restricting the nomination process, how about we simply make it more transparent? When the nominees are announced, list who nominated them (and maybe explicitly call out cases where the nominating W3C member already has a standing TAG member who isn't affected by that election). I think this is some potentially valuable information which is currently not being disclosed to the AC.

Actually, why limit nominations to AC reps?  Why not just allow
anybody to nominate candidates?

The current limitations (must be nominated by an AC Rep, each AC rep
can only nominate one person) have generally been worked around by
anybody with the right connections, by just asking around for AC
reps willing to nominate them.

Restricting candidate nominations the way we do seems like it's
solving a problem that seems unlikely to exist (flood of unqualified
candidates) in a way that may bias the candidate pool towards the
well-connected (or those being supported by somebody
well-connected).

(There could be, say, a backstop provision that if there are more
candidates than, say, three times (the number of available seats
plus one), then an extra nomination phase in which candidates need
to be nominated by an AC Rep gets added.)

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)