I actually think that we should prefer a very open process, but maybe we need to be a bit clearer about how this is done. On the one hand, especially if @k.joseph is feeling unsure about whether he followed the right process in his recent nomination, then we clearly haven’t done enough to make it clear how one should go about handling nominations. On the other hand, I quite like this quote from this page in the Wiki:
Developer stages are not meant to create a bureaucratic process around community privileges.
And I think it’s good if we can keep the process as simple as possible.
Ideally, I think, anyone at /dev/3 or higher should be able to nominate any other person they feel meets the criteria to progress to another stage. And of course, anyone should be able to nominate themselves for a new dev stage.
Doing this via Talk is nice: it’s asynchronous, so it doesn’t have to wait for certain people to sign-off or for a particular scheduled meeting; it’s public, so everyone can see the process as it happens.
Realistically, though, this hasn’t been the real process. To try to be transparent about this, there have been some private threads on Talk related to nominating people (mostly getting sign-off from either myself or @dkayiwa and coordinating who writes the post); I’m sure there are others I haven’t been part of. Likewise when I was first promoted, I too ran nominations past Dan before posting them on Talk. And looking back through the last few self-nomination posts have clearly been written after the person nominating themselves has reached out to Dan (who probably told them exactly what he’s told me: that’s fine; post it to Talk and get the community’s input).
So, from my perspective I think the questions I would want to be asking are:
- How do we make it very clear that it is perfectly acceptable to nominate yourself for a new dev stage?
- How do we make it clear to /dev/3s and above that they are allowed to nominate others?
I would suggest that maybe one thing that would be helpful to do is to create some templates on the Wiki with the text for nominating someone and text for nominating yourself.
Some examples of nominations that I think are excellent:
This one for @jayasanka is one of the best-written nominations I’ve seen. This one for @aman is short but extremely clear about why @aman is qualified. This self-nomination from @permissionerror and this other self-nomination from @ivange94 are, I think models for how self-nominations should look.
Hopefully this doesn’t derail the conversation here. Overall, I want to be sure we have a process that is clear, transparent, and frequently taken advantage of. 
PS I’m much less concerned with validating whether a recommendation is right or not; perhaps it makes sense to place some onus on the person writing the nomination to explain why they feel that the person they are nominating meet the criteria and as long as the explanation is good, I don’t see why we’d ever want to discourage someone.