Nominating a professor for a fellowship I know a professor who is really brilliant, but also very modest. This professor has helped me to progress in life. Now, I want to express my gratitude by nominating him as ACM Fellow. However, I have no experience in situations of this kind and I would like to ask you a couple of questions:


When you are nominating a professor for a fellow title, do you need to ask permission to him? or should I keep the process in secrecy?
In case the fellow title may not be granted to him, could this fact hurt his reputation?
Is it ethical to try convince other professors to support my nomination application?
First make sure that you have read all the regulations for the award (in the case of ACM fellows: http://awards.acm.org/fellow_nom_guide.cfm). You see that the nomination in this case is quite some work. Especially question 3 is already answered there: You need five endorsers. Hence, it is expected that you "convince five people to support the nomination".

For question 2 it seems pretty clear that the ACM fellowship is really very competitive, so not getting the fellowship will not really hurt (not getting the Nobel price is also not a big deal for most people). 

For question 1: In my opinion you do not need to ask for permission. The awardees do not have any obligations so they will not have any burden from this award. I also think (but I am not sure about this) that is usual to not inform people that you want to nominate them. However, you need to provide a lot of information to the award giving institution and it is also not unusual to ask the person that you want to nominate "I (better: We) plan to nominate you for this award and would appreciate if you could provide us this and that information to prepare the nomination."