[governance] Reinstate the Vote
Alejandro Pisanty
apisan at servidor.unam.mx
Thu Nov 22 20:05:33 EST 2007
Hi,
(do note cc: list cleaned)
rehash, rehash... it is good to see that rehashing 2000 is taking you all
through the same steps, and to quite the same conclusions that led us in
how to organize and perform the 2000 ICANN elections for Directors. One
difference, we actually had a commitment to do them, and did, so we
didn't have the luxury of rehashing forever.
Now several of you in good faith have laid out the true conceptual problem
of a global election like the one made for the ICANN Board in 2000.
Assuming for a moment that someone in this list is going to look beyond
their ICANN obsession some decade later in life, the following may be a
useful transmission of experience.
Elections are premised on the idea of dividing the electorate into votes
for alternatives. The underlying, unspoken assumption is that there *is* a
well-defined electorate. It has been proven by Tyrians and Trojans here
that there is none for the global Internet - either you can't assure you
get everybody to vote, or you can't find the way to gerrymander them into
smaller precincts (the USian term is "constituency", as many know) that
suit your taste, or you don't like the districts you get because of their
size, geographical location, lack of tie to a geographical location, etc.
In the At-Large election without a well-defined electorate is that each
candidate essentially not only brings in his/her own vote, he brings his
own piece of electorate to register and then vote. Knowing who has
registered you can basically know who will win. If spurious or unexpected
motives are pushed, you may get equally unexpected electorates (for
example, in one country, and in one cultural/language sphere, national
pride was moved, including media such as Der Spiegel, with the phrase
"it's time for [one of ours] to sit on the global government of the
Internet." Skewed, untrustworthy, subject to corporate or national
capture, un-transparent... you can get good results, or an engineer who
decides to squander his technical-knowledgeability capital to try to
outlawyer the lawyers, whatever.
In my country, Mexico, we know well how this works. A ruling, powerful
party buses in hundreds of peasants to each polling station and wins the
day. The party that doesn't have that power loses.
This is in a nutshell where we stood in 2000 and where the honest,
laboring minds among this group will get when you finish rehashing the
question.
We in the ICANN Board were faced with the fact that we did have a
commitment to get the voice of the general Internet user globally into the
policy development of ICANN. What we finally found useful is to build the
ALAC structure, based on organization with bona fide existence and
representation, and built a web of trust so that we always can know with
whom we are talking. The concept is imperfect but less so than the global
election. It has more corporativism than some would like (mostly in
individualistic cultures) but actually feeds in a strong voice from the
users. The record shows this inequivocally.
Eventually users' voices, organization, and representation will evolve,
and one of the legally-mandated review cycles of ICANN will give rise to a
better structure.
But the important point for this list is to know what are the difficulties
and some solutions, some experiences to be interpreted and translated to
other fields, once someone really decides to see beyond, outwards, into
the future.
Yours,
Alejandro Pisanty
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
Director General de Servicios de Computo Academico
UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico
Tel. (+52-55) 5622-8541, 5622-8542 Fax 5622-8540
http://www.dgsca.unam.mx
*
---->> Unete a ISOC Mexico, www.isoc.org
Participa en ICANN, www.icann.org
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
On Thu, 22 Nov 2007, Jacqueline A. Morris wrote:
> Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 20:36:24 -0400
> From: Jacqueline A. Morris <jam at jacquelinemorris.com>
> Reply-To: governance at lists.cpsr.org,
> Jacqueline A. Morris <jam at jacquelinemorris.com>
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org, 'Carlos Afonso' <ca at rits.org.br>
> Cc: 'Milton L Mueller' <mueller at syr.edu>, yehudakatz at mailinator.com
> Subject: RE: [governance] Reinstate the Vote
>
> Hi CA
> Yes - the concept of balancing by size also is a very important one. The Caribbean at 14 million or so will never be able to outvote Brasil alone, far less the rest of LA. So what's the incentive for participation in an election of this nature?
> What do we think about a system of proportional representation to an electoral college (like Danny's new NomCom) - but a big one so that even the smallest country (Like Barbados with 300k people) can have maybe 1 member and thus a voice - and then have that college vote for the 5 or 9 people that will sit on the Board?
> That seems as if it would solve the problem of size, as well as the problem of not having representation at all - if in a place, we have a few people voting in the first election, we still have a voice in the college with our minimum 1 position, and as internet penetration increases, and users get more interested and more educated, we have more weight as more people vote.
>
> But then, none of these people will be truly "representative" of all the millions and millions - so "direct representation" by voting in any way will never be fully "representative".
>
> So - is this even something that we should be focusing on or should we focus on getting people more educated and more active and participating, thus getting closer to an informed global user constituency and away from the little cliques of the cognoscenti (us) who currently "represent"? This informed constituency can then leverage its size into power to demand changes.
>
> Jacqueline
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Carlos Afonso [mailto:ca at rits.org.br]
> Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 15:37
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Jacqueline A. Morris
> Cc: 'Milton L Mueller'; yehudakatz at mailinator.com
> Subject: Re: [governance] Reinstate the Vote
>
> Trying to add to the excellent comments by Jacq, I recall the crucial
> flaws in ICANN's "direct election" process of the past -- the planet
> were the "user community" lived (now that Vint is talking about the
> interplanetary Internet...) was then divided (by a high-school geography
> professor from Nowhere Bay, Arkansas, I assume) by regions -- each
> region would elect one rep.
>
> Not only the regional division was politically stupid (Mexico was part
> of the North American region, not of Latin America and the Caribbean,
> and so on -- I am sure most Mexicans who knew about this were pissed off
> knowing they would certainly always be represented by a "gringo", even
> if this "gringo" were -- and was -- our nice compa Karl Auerbach), but
> also the electoral system would allow for the perpetuation of certain
> countries' reps in power.
>
> There were no rotation provisions, no parameters to balance a 190M
> people country like Brazil with a 1M people country like Trinidad and
> Tobago. Fine, all are Internet users (after we take a huge dosis of
> naïveté medicine), but in the regional division, the Brazilian rep, in
> the absence of balancing and rotation provisions, would always win in
> its region. Mexico or Canada would never win in their region, and so on.
> BTW, in protest, at the time I voted for the Uruguayan candidate. Is it
> too naïve to believe in this context that any elected regional rep will
> be representing the region's interest in an impartial manner, not the
> interests who pushed in her/his favor? It is, unfortunately.
>
> And, above all, the set of five elected were a nearly 1/4 minority in
> the board, giving them at best (if they could build consensus among them
> around crucial issues) an advisory or minority vote nature. At the time,
> ICANN was in the end seeking cosmetic legitimacy disguised as universal
> user representation.
>
> Andrew McLaughlin (now Google's Ãber lawyer) coordinated that electoral
> process (at the time he defended it of course), and certainly could give
> us a good critical (I hope!) view of it.
>
> We enter into a territory of tremendous complexity when we want to
> establish representation of the "user community" -- this is too big, too
> diversified, and at the end too UNrepresentative precisely because of
> its generic, diverse, multisectoral, multicultural, multi-etc nature.
> And, most importantly, traversed by all interest groups (the user as a
> rep is actually a rep of his/her interest group etc etc).
>
> So, reinstate the vote for whom, for what, with what expected legitimacy
> and true representation??? It is the real world (you know, the planet?)
> we are talking about... What structures of representation could we think
> of instead of repeating the disaster of the past?
>
> --c.a.
>
> Jacqueline A. Morris wrote:
>> Hi Milton
>> I believe that direct voting by individual internet users will continue to
>> skew towards specialist and tech-savvy people in developed countries who
>> have consistent and adequate internet access, access to information about
>> the vote etc. The ALS model works to get information to and from users who
>> are affected by, but not motivated or know enough or are connected enough to
>> find out that there's a vote, where and how to vote, etc.
>>
>> There are ALSes that send people out to remote rural villages that do use
>> the Internet (slow access, email only sometimes) but these users do not
>> spend their time following these processes. These ALS members have a
>> consultation - explain the issues, discuss how they will affect those users,
>> and return with information on how those users see specific issues.
>>
>> That's the educational and outreach value of the ALS structure. Since the
>> Caribbean ALSes have formed, there's all sorts of projects that I've seen to
>> educate and inform the internet-using public about governance and technical
>> issues - in schools, radio programmes, etc. I have been informed that this
>> is not just in the Caribbean either... so there's value in the ALS model
>> that is not there in "direct representation"
>>
>> But if there were to be another "global election"...
>>
>> What can you suggest to make sure that a global vote catches as many people
>> as possible in the net? What's the minimum acceptable participation? Of 1
>> billion, what % would count as a representative global election? Can we do
>> this properly without IDN implementation? As that might discriminate against
>> non-ascii script users? How many languages should the ballot be in? How
>> should the information be disseminated to make sure that EVERY user knows
>> about the vote and the issues?
>>
>> It might make sense in the future when we're all connected from birth, but
>> right now, any election would not be truly 'global"
>>
>> jacqueline
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu]
>> Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 10:19
>> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; yehudakatz at mailinator.com
>> Subject: RE: [governance] Reinstate the Vote
>>
>> Yehuda:
>> It is good to see your support for this very simple and basic form of
>> accountability, which ICANN abandoned in 2000 after the party slate lost the
>> election in the US and Europe.
>>
>> This form of public input is far more meaningful than the ALAC, which
>> requires people to invest hundreds of hours creating and maintaining
>> organizations which is simply not economically viable given the small stakes
>> individual internet users have in domain name issues.
>>
>> To support democracy in ICANN about all you can do now is:
>> * provide input to ICANN's At Large AC review process, which will be
>> starting soon
>> * Make comments in the US Government's February proceeding
>> * if you have lots of time to wast^^ spare, get involved in ICANN at large
>> itself and advocate that position.
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: yehudakatz at mailinator.com [mailto:yehudakatz at mailinator.com]
>>> Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 12:45 AM
>>> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
>>> Subject: [governance] Reinstate the Vote
>>>
>>> To:
>>> Mr. Kieren McCarthy
>>> General Manager of Public Participation
>>>
>>> Ok Kieren lets work together,
>>>
>>> I would like the Voting mechanism reinstated,
>>> which that was taken away shortly after the Elections in October of 2000
>>> Ref.: http://www.icann.org/announcements/icann-pr21sep00.htm
>>>
>>> Please layout the path for us to accomplish this.
>>> (walk me through it)
>>> Which Icann list(s) need posting to?,
>>> Who should we contact directly?
>>> and How should we best approach the subject matter?
>>> (provide us some suggested text)
>>>
>>> Thnx
>>> y
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