Re: [council] [ga] GA representation on the Names Council

["Joe Sims" <Joe_Sims@jonesday.com>]

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John, as usual your logic is impeccable, and I agree with everything you
say here.  (By the way, why don't you offer to serve as the GA Chair?)  It
is time for the NC to do what it was set up to do -- manage the consensus
process.  I know how tough it is, since everyone has a day job and there
are a high proportion of nuts on the GA list, but life is not fair, and the
job still must be done.  I would strongly urge your bullet point
suggestions as opposed to your earlier proposal, since that is more in line
with how the DNSO was originally structured and how it seems to me it can
best act to truly be an effective consensus development body.  I hope your
ideas will find some disciples on the NC.




John C Klensin <klensin@mci.net> on 11/18/99 08:25:28 AM
Extension:

To:   Joe Sims <Joe_Sims@jonesday.com>
cc:   council@dnso.org (bcc: Joe Sims/JonesDay)
Subject:  Re: [council] [ga] GA representation on the Names Council




Joe,

I agree on most of your principles; if we disagree, it is about
how to proceed.

In particular...

(i) We've clearly got people --some of them normally quite
reasonable-- in the GA who are feeling seriously
disenfranchised.  That feeling is at least somewhat justified:
their best hope for representation is in the IDNO, but the IDNO
is apparently in a shambles.  I believe the Board has been
prudent in deferring its certification and that it should
continue to be deferred until and unless things clearly come
together.  Their next best bet is the NCDNC but, with all due
respect to the NC members representing that constituency, it
looks pretty disfunctional (or like a small collection of
individuals each riding his or her own horse in a different
direction and unresponsive to alleged constituents) from a GA
perspective. I don't want the GA to be a separate body with
separate positions and representation either, but the
alternative is, it seems to me, to figure out a way to get NC
representation so we don't have people who are reasonable and
sensible disenfranchised.

(ii) I also agree that what is needed here is NC leadership.
But that requires that the NC start doing it: while I'm
sympathetic to "occupied with trying to make itself into a
working entity", we are inevitably operating on Internet time
here, and the NC needs to get on the stick -- either to start
leading or to announce a credible schedule about when it will
do so and what people are expected to do in the interim.

(iii) In particular, if the NC doesn't want to yield up the GA
to the forces of chaos, it should be leading, rather than
sending down "suggest a plan" requests.  The latter is likely
to produce the spectrum of results the NC deserves, especially
if a non-trivial fraction of the GA distrusts the NC as non-
representative and hostile.

(iv) Of course, the NC members -- and people active in the
Constituencies more generally-- contribute to the sense that the
GA is a separate group by ignoring it.   I understand that the
list traffic is massive and hard to swallow, but, if the GA is
to be the collection and forum to which you refer, then people
besides the disenfranchised and a few brave and stubborn souls
(and Elizabeth, who should be nominated for sainthood if
recent list behavior keeps up and she continues to keep
an even temper) have to be there and be visible.

Now, against that rather grim background, I'm trying to do a
few things -- under the "NC leadership" model, things I think
should not be necessary for anyone except the NC to do.  The
first is to try to smoke out the people whose main goal is
disruption and chaos.  It may not accomplish too much, but it
seems to me to be useful in clarifying things for the confused
and to help ICANN build explanations when the discussions end
up back to the Congress or other uncomfortable places.  It is
succeeding: we've gotten "if I can't get my way, I'd like it to
self-destruct" statements out of several of them.

Second, I'm trying to push back on the notion of voting and
vote-counting.  As you certainly know, it just doesn't work in
contexts where the membership cannot be delimited and real
people can't be distinguished from psychotic fantasies.  Again,
if the NC were providing the leadership that we both apparently
believe is their charge, maybe it wouldn't be necessary for
someone to try to use logic and explanation from the list.  And
my target here is, of course, the well-intentioned who believe
in democracy and representation, not the crazies.

Finally, I'm trying to find a _temporary_ way to reduce the
sense of disenfranchisement.  It impresses me as high risk to
ICANN for this to continue, both from the perspective of
trying to keep good people participating in the
GA (and the DNSO) who aren't effectively represented in
the Constituencies and because it lays a groundwork for
protests to governments and the press about excluded
groups.  I proposed the
randomization measure as a temporary one for precisely that
reason: it could reduce the claims of "no representation"
*while the Board and NC sorts out the questions of
constituencies and NC representation for those who now
legitimately consider themselves disenfrachised.

Now, it would be logically better to conduct that random
process only over those people who were not represented by a
Constituency.  But trying to do so would have two
disadvantages: It would be hard to identify those people in the
present climate.  Worse, shrinking the overall pool would
increase the concentration of crazies and hence increase the
odds of ending up with two or three of them on the NC.

Clearly, there are alternatives, and I probably prefer most of
them.  E.g.,

* The NC should exert enough leadership that it doesn't tell
the GA "go devise a procedure and advise us".  To do that is to
turn the GA into the separate body you want to avoid.  Instead,
the GA should prepare --if necessary via a fast-moving working
group-- a few options and then send them off to the GA for
comment (not decision) and make it absolutely clear that logic,
rather than shouting, will determine the NC's final choice.

* The NC needs to figure out a set of rules for reasonable
conduct on the GA (and other DNSO) lists and a mechanism for
getting and keeping people off the lists if they persistently
violate those rules.  The process for determining when someone
has crossed the line from "immature jerk" to "destructive and
abusive crazy" needs to be, IMO, relatively public and
transparent, but it is clear to me that such a process is
needed.  The needed technology exists and probably the sensible
people are frustrated enough with the state of the list to
accept it.  Again, if the NC wants to lead, rather than
sanctioning chaos, it needs to generate proposals and ask for
comment, not expect them to come from somewhere else.

Or we could go back and look again at the "loon council"
proposal I made --only mostly in jest-- about 18 months ago.

Bottom line is that we've got a large group of people in the GA
who are feeling disenfranchised.   Only some of them are also
nutcases.  I think that is a problem that needs solving,
_especially_ if we don't want the GA to settle down into a
separate and adversarial group/forum.  My preferred solutions
all lie in leadership from the NC.  But that must be an NC that
can do more than it has about legitimizing itself and of trying
to represent all interests and perspectives, not the narrow
interests of a collection of adversarial constituencies that
seriously overrepresent some groups and unrepresent others.  In
that context, think of my proposal as a bootstrapping and
time-buying short-term mechanism: it wasn't intended as
anything else.

      john

----------

> FWIW (which here might well not be very much), I do not think
> this suggestion would be productive.  It might well
> ameliorate the concerns you mention, but to what effect?  You
> seem to think that solving this concern will solve this
>...