Re: [ga] Watching the voting registry

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@vitaminic.net>]

On Mon, 06 May 2002 23:30:48 +0200, you wrote:

>Which is an increase by almost twenty percent since
>the last GA vote on 4 January 2002.
>http://www.dnso.org/secretariat/b11.rosterindex.html
>Since then, we suddenly have 85 new entries in the 
>voting registry, of which 92.9% are from the US.
>Now, more than half of the voting registry consists
>of entries from the USA. The optimist would call
>this outreach which is great and welcome. The pessimist
>would call it a great way to show how fragile the
>current GA structures are if you try to push hard.

I too am a newcomer on this list, though a very strange one, having
been active in ICANN since two years ago.

Being a newcomer, I did not want to enter in this debate, but about
this specific point, I really want to bring the experience that was
made by all of us involved in the At Large movement.

In year 2000, for the first At Large elections, we had similar
outreach campaigns on an even bigger scale, that were done on the line
of "go here and register and vote for our candidate", based on
simplified versions of the facts, without even giving people a clue
about what ICANN is, what it does, and all the very complex context
and structure in which it moves. The result was a short term victory
in terms of quantity of the participation, but a long term defeat, as
it was later clear to anyone that many of the people who registered
for the vote had no means to make their informed opinion, and so
phenomena such as "national capture" or bulk registrations were
evident, and were used to give credibility to the idea that online
elections are impossible. Even if much of the blame for these problems
must go to ICANN's bad organization of the event (many think it was
intentional), we now know that looking for people to be brought inside
a voting roll for a single vote will eventually blow up the whole
house.

Everybody knows that I have been very critical to ICANN - and if
someone read the comment I sent to the Reform Committee, I'm clearly
presenting a rebid or alternative roots as likely and necessary
solutions in the case ICANN will not reverse its direction. But
please, this is a very difficult and complex moment, and everyone
should work for unity, not to divide and conquer with any possible
means.

So everyone is free to register and to vote as he/she wishes, and if
the majority of the GA wants to say to ICANN that they should go to
hell and burn in flames, the GA has the right to do so, and no
procedural issues should prevent it from doing so, even if my opinion
is that this will not make the cause of public representation inside
ICANN gain even one inch, and perhaps will make us lose yards, and
that a motion on the softer line of "there should be a rebid if ICANN
does not include a proper way of representation of the public in its
Board" would be much better for everyone, and would avoid breaking the
GA in two.

The only thing I'm asking to everyone, and especially to newcomers
like me, is: before casting a vote, be sure you understand what the GA
is, what the current ICANN scenario is like, and what you are voting
about.
-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola     <vb@vitaminic.net>    Ph. +39 011 23381220
Vitaminic [The Music Evolution] - Vice President for Technology

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