Re: [ga] RE: Selecting Comments to Read Aloud

["Ben Edelman" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>]

Joanna,

You may have misunderstood.  My last message was not about participation
generally; it was about selecting comments to be read out loud.  The current
question is the right way to select comments to be read out loud: When we
have more comments in the queue than we have time available, how do we
choose which to read?  There have been a number of method suggested --
recently, and over the years -- and certainly it's not the case that every
time we've discussed this, the favored resolution has been voting.  (Indeed,
I don't recall ever hearing discussion of that approach before last week.)

To respond to your general inquiry re the status of voting by online
participants: My understanding of votes of in-person meetings if that
they're all understood, by all participants (present and not), only to
reflect "the sense of the room."  They're one way of documenting a
particular kind of consensus, but they're not the only way of making such
documentation, nor is that the only kind of consensus.  Ultimately, as I
think about the ICANN process, it seems to me that it's at least intended to
reflect broad consensus across a variety of forums -- in-person public
meetings, online on lists and comment forums, etc.  Accordingly, while a
vote may be helpful in some circumstances, I don't think it's obviously the
best choice in all cases.

For whatever it's worth, to the best of my knowledge it has not yet been the
case in any ICANN meeting that online participants were able to "vote" when
an in-person show-of-hands was requested.  That's something the remote
participation team continues to find intriuging -- and something in
principle we'd like to implement if consistent with our resources and
expertise, which we think it fundamentally is.  But a number of factors,
most significantly the ~15-20 second lag of RealMedia streaming, seem to
stand pretty seriously in the way.  So as yet we haven't felt able to move
forward with this; nonetheless, with remote participants sending substantive
comments (and also engaging in offline asynchronous discussions), my sense
is that the GA has felt OK about conducting occasional "votes,"
appropriately discounting their ultimate significance, of course.


Ben Edelman



"Joanna Lane" <jo-uk@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:<7A2DD0970520D2118FF800A0C9B3C14B0531AE@cyber.law.harvard.edu>...
> Ben Edelman wrote:-
>
> (The more we thought about voting, as contemplated by my last post with
this
> same subject line, the more concerned we became that, whatever the merits
of
> voting, it just didn't map to a practice used in the in-person meeting.
So,
> despite its initial, we ultimately came to think that voting just wasn't
> appropriate in this context.)
>
> Does this little aside to your post amount to an unilateral decision to
> sweep aside the voting rights of all remote participants, while preserving
> these same rights for attendees? If so, whoever made the decision should
be
> fired.
>
> Regards,
> Joanna Lane
>
>
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