RE: [ga] RE: issues that are long closed?

["Roberto Gaetano" <roberto@xxxxxxxxx>]

Karl, 

Thanks for the appreciation, and apologies for the delay in responding, I
have been offline few days.

> 
> It is feasible.  The election of year 2000 worked.  It's 
> problems were few and would have been readily corrected in 
> another round.  The urban legands about impossibility are 
> just that - urban legends.  And indeed, the 2000 elections 
> worked despite the active attempts to undermine them by 
> people associated with ICANN and who I believe are still 
> still associated with and compensated by ICANN. 

There are two problems I see with the global elections in the style of the
2000 round: the technique of the voting, and the relationship between the
electors and the elected.

The first one is contingent, and I agree completely with you, it worked
given the conditions, and it can be improved to work better. There are
matters associated with cost, and the risk of capture, given the relatively
small percentage of the electors, but cost can be assessed and evaluated,
and capture can be dealt with, considering also that many years have passed,
and the number of individuals who have learned about ICANN and would be
willing to vote has become larger, making capture increasingly difficult (of
course, this will vary largely with local conditions: in some parts of the
world it will be easier, in others more difficult).

However, it is the second one that worries me, because I see it as a
structural problem, inherent with the model of "one individual, one vote"
without an intermediate level of representativity. This is an issue that I
have raised way back in Cairo and Yokohama, when I was favouring a sort of
"council", elected by individuals, that in turn elected the Board Directors.
The problem is that if we have electors who number in the millions, which is
the target, there is no way that a Director could keep the contact with his
electoral body, and that the electors could debate the issues and influence
the position of the Director on the Board.

In the 2000 elections this has left the Directors free to take any position,
regardless the opinion of the electorate, who was in any way generally not
consulted. Of course, we had different results in different regions, but I
have not seen the vote of the former AtLarge Directors consistently in line
with the opinions of the individual users (at least how I would figure out
the opinions were).

For this reason I think that that model is not workable. I cannot claim that
the ALAC model is perfect, or even better, but it attempts to address the
key issue, which in my vision of the world, is not "voting power" but
"contributing power". In other words, the ability to debate and express
positions is, in my opinion, more important to the ability to express a vote
every three year, while nothing happens in between.

Now that the RALOs are formed, we will see if this approach works. I
understand that most of the (vocal) participants to this list are against,
but personally I don't see many alternatives that would ensure some level of
debate in an organizational model that would scale up to the millions of
(active) contributors. If, OTOH, we argue that the active policy making
should remain in the closed circle of mailing lists counting only few
hundreds, if not few dozens, of subscribers, while the electorate can only
vote with its feet, but does not have an active role, we go in the wrong
direction (in my opinion).
Simply put, I believe that the representative democracy model suits user
better than the direct democracy model, when we are talking about large
numbers. What can work for the mayor of a small town, where everybody know
eachother and the "town hall" can debate and rule, does not seem to scale.
More often than not we see large direct political elections involving the
millions look more like beauty contests than debate on the real issues.
Again, just my opinion and my vision of the world.


> 
> The ALAC, despite ICANN cheer leading, ICANN funding, and 
> years of ICANN life support has not achieved even a minuscule 
> portion of the internet user buy-in that was obtained in a 
> few short months by the year 2000 election.

True.
But it has obtained some practical results.
For instance, the issue report on domain tasting. Little thing, you might
argue. But going in the direction in which the voice of individual users can
influence policy.

Best regards,
Roberto