Jon Zittrain wrote,
> My high school didn't even offer a civics class!
I've found that this failure is often the real cause of contention in
arguments about membership and voting...
> Take #1 on the membership solution: make it an open membership;
> people join; that's the electorate; they elect; end of story.
I'm still not comfortable: Is there a membership *problem? *Who
makes 'it' open? are the questions I start with, and I am not as far
advanced as you to be thinking about membership solutions yet,
so I'll put my primitive observations in brackets so they wont be
confused with 'responses' and 'replies' and 'rebuttals' and suchlike.
#1.A. "Who is meant to be heard through the at-large
membership?":
(Who means to hear them?)
#1.A.i The decisions ICANN might make bear on a large number of
people and
institutions.
(Ah, I Catch A Neologistic Notion! I thought we were talking about
the relation of language to (democratic) governance, but we're really
talking about ICANN. Obviously, I missed the premise, 'ICANN
embodies concepts of democracy,' but I can reconstruct it from the
fact that it *follows that talk about its membership as a thing to be
'solved' uses language like, "interests that *ought to be
represented," some (at least) of which are not "'specific' enough to
be accounted for in [more focussed] elections.")
#!1.A.ii 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.
(What are the issues which require, excuse me, policing? Doesnt
'open membership' mean 'those having an interest' ? Are they then
to be responsible for those having no interest?)
> 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.
(True, people who arent interested in the issues *probably arent
interested in discussing the issues in any format. Whether they
*deserve the results is more problematic; it sounds faintly like
blaming the victim.
(So between AL and SO, we have 'vague interest' and 'specific
interest'? Do the former therefore elect vague representatives to
sit vaguely on the board? If one is in the latter group - e.g. by
being connected to some specific commercial or non-commercial
'structure' - how can they claim to be as vague as everyone else?
(Isnt your 'practical fiction' what in other contexts is called
'education'? "'They' could join in order to *develop (make specific)
their interest.")
> 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?
(If there's a risk, what's the liability? What consequences might
some hypothetical issue have if it was voted on without a
sufficiently vague membership? May I suggest that the greatest
disaster would be a *learning experience*? That SOs that
specifically *dont think an informed at-large membership is in their
best interest had better tread carefully so as not to disturb the
Vagaries?)
> I [Michael] put this and several other simmering issues publicly
> on the table. In true Rashom[o]n 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.
>
So AIP had a vote on whether to accept the results of a previous
vote --
> Does this incident have implications for ICANN? I believe so.
> * * *
> 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.
(Environmental monitoring works this way, of course, tho one tries
not to brief the beetles and the bears too much -- on account of
ones peers construing it as biassing the population sample.)
> 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.
>
> * * *
>
> 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?
>
(Is entertainment not the Category of the Century? Why then
should one not understand that a MoC should belong to that
category? Has there been capture or misinformation as to Time
Inc's intentions? Can there be capture if it furthers no agendum? If
500,000 people want their candidate to be MoC, and that's more
than anybody else does, doesnt that *make him MoC? Its an
impressive accomplishment, IAC.)
> 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
(Have political action committees captured the American electoral
process -- or just installed an extra (organic, one might say) layer
of representation, to deal with the huge market, I mean numbers of
individual voters?
==========
But I have to say (coming out from behind the (screen));-), the
whole scenario sounds an awful lot like the perennial 'Lurker
Question' writ large. Do those who post represent those who dont?
Is posting per se a qualification for deciding what is on-topic? Wont
therefore some nefarious Lurkers Of All Dimensions outfit 'capture'
the process by posting rubbish -- in order to swing the vote that it
is all good shit?
A mailing list gives everyone a place to be heard. It does *not give
them a voice. If the logical application of this concept turns
Confucius** on his head, isnt that just about par for the Yak-
formation Readusthesolution? After all, he wasnt exactly
addressing the common user of the highway as the 'wise man,' nor
was there ever a question, if the road needed paving, of who would
pay for it. There'll be time enough, when we get the troops all
tucked in their oh-S.O.-comfortable niches, to learn about the
wisdom of listening on -- what do they call that list, EarCANN-L?
Cheers,
kerry
**Who speaks does not know; who knows does not speak.
