[Community-Discuss] Reform Nomcomm - was Announcement for Final Candidate Slate for Open Seat on AFRINIC Governance Committee

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jun 4, 2019, at 11:34 PM, John Walu <walu.john at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I believe the deeper question is WHY is there an increasingly smaller candidate slate of those volunteering to serve on Afrinic board, year in year out.
> 
> Two possible answers:
> A) Good candidates are avoiding the perceived 'challenging' board /management /community relationships that continue to persist. So nomcom hands are tied and cannot manufacture candidates.
> 
> OR
> B) There are actually many good candidates applying  BUT the Nomcom 'Black-box' processes is kicking them out and reducing them to 1 or 2 nominees.
> 
> To drill down to the correct answer, I think the Nomcom process needs to be reformed. 
> 
> I still do not understand the benefit of having a black box process in the nomination committee where the community has no clue about how many candidates applied, how many got knocked out and why. IF national Presidential election systems are so open about this, why is that it has to remain hidden for Afrinic?
> 
> And I say this as someone who has once served on Nomcomm as well as someone who has once been rejected by some previous Nomcomm (I want to believe it is within my right to share personal information/experience as this is not covered under NDA, but I stand to be corrected ;-)
> 
> At a minimum, we should request that as Nomcom publishes the candidate slate, they should also show a tally (without the names) of how many candidates applied, how many got kicked out, why they were kicked out and how many successfully went thro. 

In general, I agree with you. I will, however, note that it is possible that there are situations where “why” should be redacted to protect the confidentiality and dignity of the applicant who was rejected. For example, if the nominating committee had rejected a  candidate because he is under indictment and under disciplinary review in his day job for misconduct, I don’t think that nomcom should be the ones to publicly disclose those details.

> I believe this information can shed some light on the deeper question above of whether indeed we have fewer applicants or our black-box nommcom process is simply kicking them out in order to eventually present a single candidate.

My suspicion is that to some degree, both are occurring.

Owen