[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Craig Simon]

Is it better to reinstate the vote, or to push for something better?

Many of the old-timers on this list will remember me from the early 
ICANN period, when I was researching a Ph.D. that focused on DNS 
politics (Thanks again to those who graciously put up with my 
pestering). Since then, I’ve thought a lot about how a practical venue 
for online democracy might work. Earlier this year I decided to apply 
myself to implementing and refining some of those ideas.

I call my project an experiment in collaborative expression of 
converging and diverging opinion. It’s ultimately about creating a 
massively scalable mechanism for structured argument and consensus building.

What's been achieved so far is largely inspired by the preferential 
voting system used in ICANN's 2000 election. It showcases an interactive 
ranked choice ballot and highly granular visualizations of Instant 
Runoff Vote (IRV) elections, displayed round by round. See an 
operational example (for the ongoing US Democratic Party presidential 
primary) at http://www.choiceranker.com/election.php?eid=157. Thus far 
I’ve been promoting the system to political bloggers, to pollsters, and 
also to various advocates of IRV and online democracy in the US.

My long-term take on IRV goes far beyond a preferential ballot system. 
I’ve put groundwork in place at my site to allow for what I call “panel 
voting.” It’s a way of filtering and reaggregating results to show the 
behaviors within slices of the voting population.

Panel voting would permit display of collective preferences among 
pre-designated and self-designated groups of individuals. Those groups 
could be aggregated by geopolitical/regional origins, credentialed 
qualifications, professed loyalties, etc. That filtering feature is also 
intended to provide a way for new coalitions to become “conscious” of 
themselves, as potential coalition members come to recognize their 
shared preferences.

The most ambitious aspect of the project is providing a way for new 
ideas to be offered, vetted, refined, and embraced within online 
communities. My approach, still mostly on paper, would combine an open 
nomination process with dynamically convened panels whose members would 
serve as vetting juries.

I agree with Kieren about the legitimating virtue of venues in which 
power (in the form of respected candidates for leadership) can “bubble 
up” within a structured chain.

The challenge is to provide an online mechanism by which candidates for 
decision – not just people seeking office, but position papers, policy 
statements, formal agreements, and so on – can be nominated and bubbled 
up through and across various constellations of panels, seeking final 
ratification by the group as a whole.

Achieving an effective level of large-scale online democracy requires 
far better leverage of web technology than what’s been demonstrated so 
far. In my view, mailing lists, blogs, and traditional online fora are 
generally too linear and too noisy to help sort out the problems of 
widely diverse and rapidly growing communities. Yet they are also too 
prone to becoming echo chambers suited best for preaching to the choir. 
Wikis, though excellent at expressing the results of consensus-oriented 
processes, are poorly set up for venting the give and take of an 
underlying debate.

The purpose of constitutional politics is to channel conflict and 
competition. What’s needed for an Internet-based decision-making venue 
is a widely accessible, democratically open consensus-forging mechanism 
that can simultaneously open up new channels for fresh and useful input 
while also allowing friendly refinements that fortify existing 
contributions.

ICANN’s 2000 election struck me as a squandered opportunity. Though so 
many thousands of people registered and voted, there was no followup 
attempt to reconnect them and nurture what might have emerged as a 
viable online community

I’m not writing to lament the past, however, but to offer thoughts about 
how to structure a useful and enduring medium for online democracy... 
something that would be worthy of such a large community.

Does my project sound the like the right direction toward a solution set 
that would satisfy the ICANN community?

Craig Simon


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