At 08:51 AM 12/10/97 -0800, Dan Busarow wrote:
>The point that bothers me most is the one requiring members to choose
>which of the above categories they belong to and voting only that.
>This effectively break PAB into separate bodies. I think it's a
>bad idea.
I agree with you.
After many months of public input, it is clear that the POC must have
formally-chosen and explicitly-labeled representives a broad range of
constituencies. To satisfy this requirement we must find a way to determine
who someone represents. The easiest way to do this is to find a number of
acceptable "sources" of representatives for onstituency, one for each.
This is essentially impossible to do in a straightforward manner. None of
the constituencies that are of interest (ISPs, end-users, "industry"...)
are represented by a single organization which is broadly accepted by the
people and organizations which compose that constituency.
As such, it seems best to use an open group for the gTLD activity as the
source for all of these representatives. That is the reason for suggesting
use of the PAB for the voting. This reduces the problem to one of choosing
a way to select the candidates and aligning them, i.e., labeling who they
represent, and then defining a way for to conduct voting which is felt to
be valid.
The simplest (and, I think, best) way to decide who a candidate represents
is to let each candidate declare it themselves and then let people voting
decide whether they agree. They do that by voting.
The next question is who votes for particular constituencies. It seems to
me entirely reasonable to worry about the "competence" of those voting. If
someone has nothing to do ISPs, they are not competent to select a
representative of that constituency. If one has nothing to do with matters
of intellectual property and trademark law, one should not vote on their
representative.
The proposal posted by David Maher requires partitioning the PAB membership
into the different constituencies and restricts the voting according to the
chosen category.
I think there are two serious problems with this aspect of the proposal.
The first is that many PAB members legitimately belong to more than one
category.
The second is that the process of partitioning the membership strikes me as
an extra step which will prove difficult, causing delay, and also seems
likely to be pretty contentious.
Hence I think we should strongly consider an alternative approach for doing
the voting.
The proposal posted by Robert Shearing (see the gtld-mou RFC archives)
suggested giving each PAB member one vote for each slot. Hence, everyone
would vote on every representative. This results in exactly the problem of
"incompetent" votes, with people voting for constituencies about which they
are not familiar.
A refinement which was later suggested (I think I heard it privately so
it probably is not on a mailing list archive) was to reduce the number
of votes each member may cast, perhaps giving every PAB member a vote
for
one-half of the number of candidates.
This means that those voting must decide which categories (constituencies)
they consider to be most important to their organization. I believe this
refinement is an extremely clever way to obtain a high degree of
"competent" voting without requiring an procedural complexity. I believe
it also will tend to cause those voting to think a bit more carefully about
their choices.
I encourage consideration of this alternative for the voting mechanism.
d/
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Dave Crocker dcrocker@imc.org
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