[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Dan Krimm]

At 8:36 PM -0800 11/20/07, Kieren McCarthy wrote:
>Bloody hell - why on earth didn't you boil this down and email it as a
>comment to either of the frameworks' public comment periods?


Short answer: I didn't have the time, at the time, due to other pressing
obligations.

Even though I spend a good deal of time paying attention to IG and ICANN
issues, I don't get paid a farthing for it, and it has to take a back seat
to efforts to get paid.  I can't keep up on *every* proceeding happening at
ICANN, as I'm sure no one really can.

I saw the announcements and thought "gee, I'd like to get into that" and
then thought "gee, I don't have time to research and address this properly"
and left with "darn, it'll have to work itself out without me."  Not that
my individual voice is really likely to turn the aircraft carrier, which
does undermine the incentive to risk finite (and thus precious) time
resources on action that could easily be abjectly ignored...

I have a lot of incoming bogies to shoot down in my data stream, and
sometimes I can't prioritize the ones you want at the times you want it.
This time you were just lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of
view).  A different week and I may have been off doing something else.



This is a persistent reality for all members of the public, as well as many
members of the SOs and ACs.  The idea of important policy being decided by
many individuals who have little hope of spending full time resources on
deliberation puts ICANN between a rock and a hard place.

Without electing full-time paid legislators to represent the public (heck,
most national-level legislators also have several full-time paid staff
dedicated to their individual offices), separate from the various
quasi-formal stakeholder groups currently surrounding and embodying ICANN
policy-making, I don't see how this can ultimately be resolved.  And by
itself, such a step may likely still be insufficient to create productive
policy making procedures at ICANN, for example if it is not also
accompanied by some way of creating an independent judiciary to review the
results of legislation.

Dan

PS -- I suppose that one way to get paid for dealing with ICANN issues is
to try to get hired as staff.  Don't think that I haven't considered it
once or twice along the way.  But I've ultimately shied away from it,
because I doubt that I would be qualified for a position that has real
influence in addressing these structural matters or influencing productive
change in policy processes, and it would be agonizing for me to have to
adhere to a system that was so at odds with itself, especially if it does
not have an internal culture of talking truth to power (which is rare in
this world -- the default assumption is that any random organization does
not have this culture, even though it offers a significant survival
advantage for most organizations).


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