According to the Nominating Committee Call for Expressions of Interest in Assessment Team, this year's NomCom is planning to employ a search firm to help it find Board candidates.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends enormously on the implementation. Ominously, the terms of reference include this instruction,

# Provide to the Nom Com a short written qualitative assessment and conclusions formed from each candidate interview, together with a numeric rating of suitability for each position considered on a scale to be jointly agreed upon initially by the organization and the Nom Com.

Based on my two terms on the NomCom, I do think it's a fair criticism that the existing practices don't do as good a job as they should in finding a deep enough pool of highly qualified developing country and non-native-English-speaking candidates from outside Europe. A search firm whose mission was to add some richness to that pool might be a very good thing.

But there are two ways to use a search firm that I think would be very harmful. The first would be to give the search firm any input, even "just" evaluating, candidates who come to the nomcom via other channels. The second, almost as bad, would be to give the search firm anything but the most limited mandate to rate the candidates it finds. There is no question that any mechanistic process to try to score candidates will work to the disadvantage of the sort of untraditional candidates that ICANN needs to be more open to. (It will also tend to favor age -- more demonstrated accomplishment -- over youth, already a perennial problem.)

A critical part of what the nomcom does is slate-making: trying to find a balance of talents. It's not a mechanistic process, and trying to reduce it to scores on some too-rigid pre-determined set of criteria would harm the process. Yet, because of the tight time-limits on which the NomCom works, there's a real danger that candidates with low scores based on whatever system emerges won't get their due. The numbers of files involved has been large but in no way unmanageable in the past; the NomCom shouldn't allow anyone to do its screening for it.