[governance] individuals

[Vittorio Bertola]

Bram Dov Abramson ha scritto:
> But in case not.  Imagine if some definition was agreed upon for "civil
> society organisation"; if any such CSO could submit to the IGF an
> any-length list of voters; if any voter could appear on, I don't know,
> zero to two voters' lists; if an election was so convened to represent
> civil society.

This is actually one of the ideas we had in mind for the "ICANN At Large 
2.0" effort. However, there are a couple of fundamental problems, since 
you can't trust all CSOs to produce true lists of voters without 
cheating, as their weight in the process is directly proportional to how 
many people they put onto their list. First, it is very difficult to 
verify that all people on a CSO list are real, and not just fake names 
and email accounts; and second, they could nonetheless fill up their 
lists with real individuals that don't even know about being there. (You 
also have the conceptual issue of individuals being members of more than 
one CSO and so possibly counting more than once.)

So either you centralize the creation of the voters roll, which solves 
the second problem, but leaves you with the first; or give up on this 
model altogether, acknowledge that you can't reliably assess the size of 
NGOs, and go by a "one org one vote" model, which however leaves the way 
open to the opposite type of cheating, i.e. people forming many fake 
tiny organizations just to gain votes.

For the European At Large, I've been proposing a model (yet to be 
discussed) which is sort of half and half, e.g. organizations can 
accredit themselves and appoint one representative each; individuals can 
accredit themselves (with their identity being verified at random with 
simple manageable procedures) and appoint one representative every X of 
them. (If you're really interested, the link is 
http://bertola.eu.org/euralo_principles.pdf )

However, as I said before, this is a structure conceived for a purely 
representational model, in which the main objective of the structure is 
to elect representatives at the topmost level (which would be elected by 
the council of intermediate reps composed as above). This caucus is very 
different, as its structure should be more focused on consensus building 
and position making, rather than on selecting representatives; and as 
its size is supposed to be (at least for the foreseeable future) much 
smaller than the At Large. So, personally, I think that we can still get 
away with the "group of peer individuals" structure, which is the 
simplest one, and the easiest to manage.

> The process itself is no doubt clunky and subject to streamlining and
> tamper-proofing and so forth -- you'd want rules in place that avoided
> CSOs which simply signed people up in order to give them a vote (or
> would you?), and there are lots of ways to do that, too -- but that's
> hardly the point, I think.

It exactly is the point: the process seems nice and clean in theory, but 
gets more and more difficult as you get into practicalities, up to the 
point of becoming almost impossible to implement with the scarce means 
of civil society. (Sure, if you had access to each country's official 
population records, or if you had people paid to deal with checking 
identities, or if you could get all domain resellers of the world to 
authenticate their customers... but you don't.)
-- 
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Prima o poi...
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