[governance] Reinstate the Vote

Mon Nov 26 13:58:22 EST 2007

Hi Milton
How about changing the statement of the problem:

Rather than:
" one side feels that they cannot trust a democratic Board election system
and prefer something more manageable and controllable; the other side wants
to empower a global public"

How about:
one side feels that they cannot subscribe to an election system that has no
safeguards to ensure a true "global" reach and thinks that elections in this
situation will give an advantage to economically empowered users in the
North, and prefer a system that is less ostensibly representative but gives
weight to less-developed regions globally; the other side wants to run a
one-user one-vote election that might essentially be a US-ian and European
election, as few users in the South will be informed or able to vote, and
are against a system that focuses on education and empowerment of
less-informed and less-developed users.

The two statements will provoke very different discussions... Of course
there's a neutral way to state the discussion and neither of the above is
it. 

Jacqueline

-----Original Message-----
From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu] 
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 11:30
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Craig Simon; Kieren McCarthy
Subject: RE: [governance] Reinstate the Vote

Craig:
Thanks for your constructive intervention. I've reviewed the site and it's
interesting. Of course from political science I am familiar with different
techniques of voting and yes, one can design systems that are much better at
aggregating preferences than what ICANN did in 2000, or for that matter one
could improve the voting systems used by any organization. 

The problem is that we are not engaged on a debate about the proper voting
technique; we are debating whether there should be voting _at all_. It is an
essentially political debate in which one side feels that they cannot trust
a democratic Board election system and prefer something more manageable and
controllable; the other side wants to empower a global public. Until there
is broader political consensus on this question, the question of the
specific technique used to implement democracy is secondary.

--MM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Craig Simon [mailto:cls at rkey.com]
> Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 9:05 AM
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Kieren McCarthy
> Subject: Re: [governance] Reinstate the Vote
> 
> 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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