Kevin,
You are making the chair a committee with this suggestion -- the chair
essentially performs the function you would assign to a committee. I
disagree strongly with the idea of having a Consensus Working Group -- this
will create a very strong, unaccountable power group who will have the
power to say what consensus is -- and who will gainsay them? If experience
is any guide, it will be populated by the same people who are appointed to
POC. It would spell the end of PAB as an independent body.
The PAB is an open body where anyone's message is posted to the list with
the same weight as another persons. That is its strength as well as what
makes it cumbersome. A consensus in PAB, while perhaps difficult to
achieve, is very strong when it happens. There is no back room in PAB when
it comes to policy issues, and only a minimal bureaucracy.
Your suggestion makes PAB a representative democracy -- with the Consensus
WG as the controlling body --, except that people won't have a chance to vote.
I think PAB is best served by strengthening its participatory character,
not by moving effective control of the decision-making process to a small
group.
Antony
At 01:59 PM 12/18/97 -0500, kconnolly@evw.com wrote:
>{This one's not short, either. I have put a short summary at the end}
>
>Dear Colleagues:
>
>What Kent is calling to our attention is the need to create a true
>constitution for PAB. There are many people whose lives will not
>seriously be impacted by what we --the members of the PAB and the
>gTLD MoUvement generally-- say and do. There are many others who
>are seriously frightened as all get-out that we might represent the bow
>wave of a new internationalist movement. The fact that this movement is
>driven by technology rather than ideology does not defuse peoples'
>concerns. We need to improve the legitimacy of the entire gTLD
>MoUvement, and that means enlisting support from the World
>responsibly, and with the limited objective of ensuring a robust, scalable
>Internet.
>
>I believe Kent has correctly identified the crucial consideration as the
>representative (or not) nature of the PAB. We should not lose sight,
>however, of the fact that rough consensus contains its own
>safeguards. I believe that PAB works best when the participants come
>to the discussion eager to find a way to meld policy differences into a
>workable compromise. PAB is essentially a deliberative and consultative
>body, not a representative, vote-taking assembly.
>
>The weight that should be given to a participant's thoughts should be
>determined by the intrinsic worth of those thoughts. The fact that a
>participant is designated by a more or less significant economic entity is
>something to be taken into account but should never displace the
>principal that PAB acts in the public interest and for the growth and
>advancement of the Internet.
>
>At the same time, a "prejudice" might really reflect the fact that a
>participant is especially impacted by a particular policy. If an
identifiable
>constituency (for example, ISPs as a whole) were to arise within the
>PAB membership, it _should_ have a way of securing a voice in the
>Consensus WG.
>
>Hence I suggest that what is needed for PAB to function effectively is a
>revised way of finding our rough consensus. I maintain that
>"consensus" does not come from a ballot box. Consensus might be
>found in the participants' acceptance of "majority rule" before submitting
>an issue to a vote; but the ballot box does not produce consensus. In
>fact, the ballot box is the result of consensus, not its source.
>
>Note that consensus is not unanimity, either. There will always be a
>radical few (or many, for that matter) whose voices are intentionally
>disharmonious. Our search for consensus will need to filter out those
>voices while remaining open to the chance that they might really be the
>sane ones :-)
>
>What I believe is needed is that PAB be driven by a very special working
>group: the Consensus WG. The purpose of the Consensus WG is to
>identify the issues which PAB needs to address, monitor the state of the
>discussion to gauge the emergence of differences and agreements, and
>participate, as needed, to identify and develop support for beneficial
>actions by PAB.
>
>I do not believe a CORE member should be disqualified from membership
>in the Consensus WG, but we should make sure that no one set of
>prejudices obtains a dominant position in PAB. The Consensus WG can
>promote this objective since it can recognize, for example, that all of the
>people pushing for opening the root to unlimited TLD's on a first-come,
>first-served basis, are the eDNS Registrars who obviously have their
>own agenda.
>
>The tricky part is the selection of the Consensus Working Group. The
>Working Group should be large enough to be inclusive of a wide variety
>of viewpoints and backgrounds. Ideally, it should be self-defining, with a
>core (excuse the word) group of participants co-opting others and
>securing the rough consensus of the membership that this is a good
>starting point for the consensus WG. The initial bootstrap group would
>serve as a nominating committee. Note, also, that this restricts the
>conflict of interest issue to the Consensus WG. And the significance of
>the Conflict of Interest is diminished because all participants will be
>aware of the particular agenda of the other participants.
>
>Summary
>
>PAB is about discussion and thinking, not counting votes. We need to
>restructure the way in which we arrive at and measure consensus,
>because when all is said and done, it does not matter to the outside
>world how I or any other member of PAB votes. What matters is
>whether what we say makes sense or not.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Kevin J. Connolly
>
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