My stint on the PASS Nomination Committee

As you may or may not know, I was recently elected to be on the Nomination Committee for the 2015 PASS Board of Directors election. I was a part of the Election Review Committee that was convened in 2010 to go over the election process (obviously) and I was interested to see how it works currently. The only thing that might be more confusing than how sessions are selected for the PASS Summit is what the Nomination Committee is for, so I thought I'd take this time to clarify. Like with most things that have to do with humans, not everything is black and white. My reasons for writing this post (and any future posts on the process) is to illuminate what happens during the process. We're guided by the processes that have been put in place by the ERC and previous Nomination Committees. During this I may outline differing viewpoints on some of these processes, but all of the views in this and future posts are mine and mine alone.

The basic process is this:

We go through applicants to ensure that they meet the criteria outlined in the bylaws. If there are applicants that don't meet those minimum criteria, they will be contacted and will not continue through the process. The applications are not scored unless there is a need to reduce the applicant pool.

After that point, the Nomination Committee interviews the remaining applicants. We develop a list of questions to ensure that we review all of the applicants similarly. After the interviews, the candidates are scored across a list of categories. Those categories are:

• Experience with PASS
• Vision for PASS
• Understanding of the Organization
• Written and Verbal Communication Skills
• Leadership/Management Experience/Skills
• Financial Budget Experience
• References
• Other Board Experience
• Regional Influence

The list of candidates and the aggregated scores for each category are presented to the current Board of Directors as a proposed slate of candidates. The Board can accept or reject the slate. If the slate is rejected, it goes back to the Nomination Committee for continued review. If the slate is accepted, then those candidates, their applications, and their aggregated scores across the categories will be made public, and the campaigning begins.

The Nomination Committee actually continues through the election process. We help to moderate 'town hall' meetings to introduce the candidates to the PASS Community, as well as Twitter Q&A sessions. After the election, we'll come together again to see what worked well and what could be made better, and pass that on to the 2016 Nomination Committee.

So that, in a nutshell, is what we do. The applications have all been received for this year's election, and shortly we'll begin the interview process. I have not been a part of that, so I'm interested to see how it goes. I'll be blogging more about this process, but if you have any questions in the meantime, please let me know.