Kerry,
My high school didn't even offer a civics class!
Take #1 on the membership solution: make it an open membership; people
join; that's the electorate; they elect; end of story. If this appeals to
you there's no such thing as a "captured" electorate, because it simply is
what it is. There's no gold standard against which to compare it to see if
it's "right" or "wrong."
Possible problem on take #1 generated from the question, "Who is meant to
be heard through the at-large membership?":
p1/ The decisions ICANN might make bear on a large number of people and
institutions. All have interests that ought to be represented or at least
accounted for. The purpose of the at-large electorate is to represent
those whose interests aren't "specific" enough to be accounted for in the
elections that take place for the SO half of the board. (Otherwise, why
not just elect the whole board from the three SO's and be done with it?)
p2/ Despite p1, ICANN's subject matter is abstruse. People who might be
affected by ICANN policies may have no interest in joining, or even a sense
why they should join.
From this, at least two possible conclusions:
c1a/ No problem. So long as people had a chance to join and chose not
to, they deserve whatever results from the process they ignore.
c1b/ Problem: those with a very direct and structured interest (and
probably well represented within the SO structures) will simply populate
the at-large electorate as well. They'll elect people responsive to them,
and the goal of having broad representation from Internet users at-large
will be a practical fiction bracketed only by the point that "they could
have joined."
It's the second conclusion that makes one worry about comparing an "actual"
electorate to a reference of the population intended to be represented by
it. In my note to Eric I used international representation since it's the
easiest to measure demographically: suppose three months after the at-large
electorate was made available to join, 90% of its members all hail from the
U.S., and 90% of those from Washington, DC. To me that's a materialization
of the risk in c1b above; to you--is it just the breaks? That's the
electorate, so let's go with it?
The archives of our open "Representation in Cyberspace" workshop--see
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rcs>--are worth a listen. Some of the
panelists hit this point pretty hard. Mitch Ahern of the Association of
Internet Professionals, a membership organization, related an interesting
story, which I don't know has ever been posted here. Here it is, with his
permission:
* * *
At our last board election, the first I participated in as an *AIP* board
member, our electoral infrastructure was quite deficient. Bad database
functionality, lack of procedures, poor bylaws, etc. We ended up using
the facility of one of our board members who had educational
institutional resources at hand. During the process of error-checking an
anomalous "block" of identical votes turned up. In attempting to
determine whether this was due to some sort of technical glitch it was
discovered that *all* of these votes had been cast by the management
company we use for back-office services.
Now the board member who discovered this should not have been looking at
the voting results, but his integrity is such that I'm sure it was an
innocent attempt to discover a glitch. Therefore this "couldn't be
publicly discussed."
Certain board members were already quite dissatisfied with the management
company. This "confidential" meme circulated and served as a "last straw"
for some of them, particularly since one board member (unpopular with
staff) may have lost his seat due to the voting block. However since this
was "confidential" these members had to find other issues to try to break
the agreement with. The board/staff relationship deteriorated rapidly.
Upon my election to Chairman, and subsequent to the refusal of this issue
to "go away" I put this and several other simmering issues publicly on
the table. In true Rashoman style events had two divergent
interpretations.
All staff members had joined our organization as a show of support, and
as a management company of an Internet non-profit considered themselves
"Internet professionals." When the ballot came around everyone asked "Who
should we vote for?" Answers were supplied and the voting block formed.
An innocent misunderstanding or cynical vote-rigging? I supported
misunderstanding, and the issue faded away. It took much longer to
straighten out board/staff relations, but that has been largely achieved
as well.
Does this incident have implications for ICANN? I believe so. The odd and
poorly defined interlocking ICANN membership structures make vote rigging
not only possible, but possibly even legitimate. Once the SO structures
are in place the questions of who can vote for what and when loom large.
Mitchel Ahern
Chairman, AIP
* * *
Take #2 (suggested by Jim Fishkin): Do an internet "deliberative
poll." Select a body of Internet users (if that's the defined group that
at-large membership is supposed to represent) at random and make them, with
their consent, the electorate for a round. Brief them, expose them to
ideas from all sides, and let them decide. This idea was way too radical
for the MAC, but it does get one thinking about electorates. Jim Fishkin
is fond of telling the following story (this excerpted from the Guardian):
TIME magazine's prestigious Man of the Century should be a global figure,
a person of calibre and distinction whose fame transcends frontiers, a Gandhi,
perhaps, or a Mao. A man whose influence has shaped the world and whose
name is
known from Ankara to Zanzibar.
Step forward . . . Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. A household name in Ankara he
certainly is - as founder of the Turkish republic 74 years ago - but who knows
who he is anywhere else?
Time magazine, which has asked readers to nominate the key people of the
century, appears to be falling victim to Today Programme Personality of the
Year
Syndrome: intense lobbying on behalf of an underdog for political purposes.
In Turkey the prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, and President Suleyman
Demirel have joined a frenzied media campaign to have their man win.
Offices and
banks have voting forms which members of the public can sign.
Already Ataturk is streets ahead of the opposition. Diane Pearson, a Time
magazine official, said yesterday that he had received between 500,000 and 1
million votes. "Our fax lines have been tied up for hours."
Ataturk leads Bob Dylan in the Entertainers and Artists category. He is
more of a Hero and Adventurer than Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King.
Einstein isn't even relatively close in Scientists and Healers, while Henry
Ford
and Bill Gates are fighting it out for second place in Builders and Titans.
Only in the Warriors and Statesmen category has he work to do. Winston
Churchill (Man of the Half-Century 50 years ago) leads. But one Turkish
newspaper claimed many Churchill votes came from Greece in a vain attempt to
stop the Ataturk bandwagon.
* * *
Assuming the vote wasn't fraudulent--i.e. no one voted twice--is Ataturk
deserving of the best "entertainer and artist" mantle, or has there been
"capture" in the election?
It seems to me an echo of Mitch's story. For those who say that a
particular group--CORE, say--has "captured" the DNSO process, is that the
same kind of "capture" as the Turks with TIME, or the backoffice people
with AIP? ...JZ
