[ga] Matters to discuss

[Joe Kelsey <joe@zircon.seattle.wa.us>]

Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes:
 > - Who are the GA members?
 >    - What is the definition of a GA member?

The DNSO GA shall consist of individuals who apply to be recognized as
members.  The member recognition process must attempt to weed out
"personas" from real people.  The basic recognition process must
associate a specific e-mail address with a specific, verifiable person.
The only way to do this currently is to use a PKI certificate signed by
a recognized signer which validates physical identity before creating
the certificate.  That means that someone has to be able to see the
identity behind the certificate and make sure the person is not using
other e-mail addresses.  This raises the level of fraud to that of
forging standard identification documents, but it also adds to the
administrative overhead for the DNSO.  Do we have a budget to support
this process?  If we do not have the budget, then we might as well give
up on validated membership right now.

 >    - How do we check that people conform to the definition?

Someone associated with the DNSO has to validate membership.  Does a
budget exist within ICANN to support this?

 > - How does the GA decide?
 >    - How is a decision (or alternate decisions) proposed to the GA?

Questions are posed via a "public comments" Web page.  Questions posed
must be seconded via the same mechanism within 3 days.  Seconding
requires 1% (of the defined GA membership) favorable response to the
question.  Seconded questions are debated on the GA mailing list.  I
would really like it if we could define some sort of consensus
procedure, but I have the feeling that the DNSO GA will be just too
divided on many issues to be anything more than a straight democracatic
body.  Calling a question is a difficult decision.  How do you determine
that enough debate has taken place?  Time limit?  Straw poll?

 >    - How does the GA choose to make (or not make) a decision?

Once a question is on the floor, so to speak, it has to eventually be
tabled or voted on.  Voting will be done through e-mail ballot
notification and recorded on a web site.  Kent Crispin's vote bot seems
like a good choice.

I can imagine several different methods to validate members and propose
questions for discussion.  I have a very hard time figuring out how to
fairly limit debate and call a question.  How much voting will people
want to do?  Vote on every item?  Vote multiple times per day?  I only
read my personal e-mail in the evening, and the GA is personal e-mail
and not work-related.  Therefore, people who read at work, and who work
in similar time-zones may get one idea of how a debate is going until
those in other time-zones or who do not read at work enter the debate.
For that reason, it would not work to have multiple ballots per day or
even per week.  I can see requiring a ballot within two weeks of posing
a question to see if debate should continue, but if you really need
something decided sooner than that, I just don't see a realistic way to
do it.

I am really stuck on the member validation until we know whether and how
much administrative support the DNSO GA has.

/Joe
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