Re: [ga] nomination procedures

[John C Klensin <klensin@mci.net>]

Jon,

Thanks for the kind words.
I mostly agree with Kent's remarks, but let me add an
(unfortunately long) observation...

I agree with you that it is important that the GA chair to have
strong support in the GA (or at least to be broadly acceptable,
which I think is closer to the point for a chair.   But I think
that must be to an "extended GA", not just those who can still
stand voicing their positions on the list in the presence of the
goings-on of the last weeks.   It should include those who would
like to participate, or who have participated, but who have
dropped out or gone completely silent because of the noise,
volume, and abuse levels.  It has become clear in the last few
weeks that we have several participants who are determined
--whatever their motivations and justifications-- to make the
process and/or ICANN fail.  They are entitled to representation;
I'm of the school that believes that even the proverbial
lunatics in the aslyum are entitled to representation.   But
they shouldn't dominate the process unless we really believe
that failure of ICANN and the chaos that might ensue is the
desire of most users of the Internet.

In the current environment, "broad acceptability to the GA"
isn't going to be represented by an endorsement count, or a
signature count, or a voting process.   In an ideal world --if
we are concerned about diversity, acceptability, and
representativeness-- endorsement by both Tweedledee and
Tweedledum should perhaps not count as two endorsements.   Broad
acceptability could be partially represented by an endorsement
process if one insisted that the endorsers were spread across
camps, i.e., a list of endorsements from one faction would carry
less weight than a list that contained people from many
factions.   But, while I can identify people whose postings I
read and those for whom I often no longer bother, I have no idea
even how I would identify factions based on my personal
preferences, much less what would be a fair categorization for
the GA.

This leaves us with a really hard problem, one which those even
more cynical than I am believe that the forces of chaos have
been trying, successfully, to create.   One possibility is to go
with some sort of endorsement plan, without doing much counting
(or taking the counts too seriously) but trying to focus on
diversity of views and approaches among the endorsers.  Clearly
evaluation of that diversity is subjective, but the reality is
that while we can encourage the NC to pay attention to it or
not, they are likely to do their own evaluating whether we like
it or not.   For those of us who haven't become convinced either
that the NC members grew tails and horns when elected or that
they are a conspiracy to suppress the GA or anyone else (note
that I'm not asserting that they are as broadly representative
as I'd like) their looking at the endorsements for diversity and
including that in their decision-making process isn't a bad
outcome.  Certainly it has a lot of advantages over endless
bickering, flaming, and name-calling.

For those who want to see this fail, or who have become
convinced that the process is so corrupt as to be useless, let's
face it: no election/ voting/ nomination/ selection process is
likely to make you happy.  Perhaps your interests would be
served by proposing something that the NC feels obligated to
reject.  I doubt it: I suspect your interests would be better
served by getting out of the way here and demonstrating (as you
are presumably convinced) that ICANN can't even succeed if most
of the active participation is by those who are trying to make
the best of a not-ideal situation in a minimally adversarial
environment.   But you have to make your own decisions about
that, and clearly will, no matter why I or others think.



--On Tuesday, 16 November, 1999 23:36 -0500 Jonathan Weinberg
<weinberg@mail.msen.com> wrote:

> At 07:39 AM 11/16/99 -0800, Kent Crispin wrote (with respect
> to proposals that the GA, instead of sending to the NC *all*
> names with the support of 10 endorsers, adopt a procedure
> under which it sends over only the X names with the most
> support):
> 
> >On the other side, what practical benefit do we gain by being
> >restrictive? I don't see any.  From my perspective it just
> seems like >further sustenance for the "we vs them" engram...
>...