[governance] Nomcom and conflict of interest

[Karl Auerbach]

Milton L Mueller wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Raul Echeberria [mailto:raul at lacnic.net]
>>
>> Your email goes directly to the key point. You
>> are deffending the idea that it is impossible to
>> set up formal nomination process due to the fact
>> that some part of the community would not be
>> represented under the strict division in 3 stakeholders group.
> 
> That was not the exact point I was making, but it is one worth making. A
> discussion of that point would be more productive than an attack on the
> Nomcom report. 

It has long concerned me how we have quietly accepted the highly 
anti-democratic and paternalistic notion that people can be carved into 
pre-defined groups on the basis of a single trait (like ownership of a 
small business or a university degree in a technical or scientific 
discipline) and then assert that every member of those groups shares a 
common interest in all things.  That's why I consider "stakeholder" to 
be a septic conception.

(I have also been long concerned how we similarly classify legal 
fictions, such as corporations, into similar categories rather than 
recognizing the plurality of interests of the actual people behind those 
fictions.  But that's a matter for thread different than this one.)

Each individual person is a cauldron of conflicting interests.  That's 
just the way the world is.  (Legal fictions tend to have fewer intrinsic 
conflicts which is one reason, among many, why legal-fiction aggregates 
have obtained so much power in the present world.)

The cure for this is to recognize that conflicts exist and build 
compensating measures into the system.

For instance, we can't expect every one who is a candidate for a 
position to reveal all of his/her conflicts or, once selected, to 
carefully measure, constrain, and reveal the affects of those conflicts 
on decisions being made.

One partially curative measure would be to build into the system a way 
for everyone else to perceive the effects of those conflicts and, if the 
general perception is that the given person is doing a poor job of 
handling them, to remove that person from the position either 
immediately or at some periodic event.

That was just an example of one possible mechanism - other, additional 
mechanisms could (and should) be created to further limit the effects of 
self-interested decisions.

		--karl--



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