Re: [nc-whois] [urgent] report update

[Abel Wisman <abel@able-towers.com>]

Thomas, 

Besides some rudimentary changes everyone can possibly live with, i fail
to see where as i made several (imo) legitimate objections to change
without consent, that this should be done.

changes should only be made after consensus, not during a call between
us or others.

for the mission statement, i refer to the email earlier from Paul M
Kane, and the introduction as drafted earlier. there is no overstepping
in any way possible, the mission statement, for which i specifically
asked some months ago is just that, the statement, a copy of that (and
it's changes afterwords should suffice, interpretations are made while
working, not in reflecting the statement.

regarding changes to page 5, it was clearly agreed by a majority (ale
except Miriam C.S.afaik) (the original text) and again, to much caution
tends to weaken the result, if data is specific (and all there is) then,
after approving the way of gathering the findings, one can not return to
that and say; the findings are not statistical.
also on that point; there are 3 GA rep's on the whois tf atm, (to my
understanding) and i would like to have that reflected as such :) 

for page 10, i feel it more compelling to conclude that 33 % uses whois
very frequently then 40 % does not use heavily.

as for page 12; as i pointed out in my earlier reaction to Miriam, the
numbers remain nonsense.(SIC) for a very simple reason: we have no means
of ascertaining whether all respondents were merely working in that
"industry" or representing it.
the question was:

"1. Which of the following terms best describes your status as a
respondent to this survey?"

every line was/is then followed by "user" IOW someone working for a
government and in that function using the internet (ranging from running
the websites to maintaining the servers to running the country) now this
gives totally different numbers and ranges the possible size of the
group of ppl asnwering to several millions, a long way off from the
number Miriam provided, or do we really think that those responding were
each and every one individual appointed representatives of one of those
UN members or GAC members ??? 
In my opinion adding these numbers creates just that idea, something
which is much further from the truth then what was written,

Since the survey is after all not "statistical" it is certainly improper
to cast that shadow on it in this way. therefore again i emphasize my
objections to these changes.

As for page 21: again, there are more reps from the GA atm, also i
believe that some interesting stuff CAN be drawn from that question and
it's responses, we simply have not yet spend the time on it, as on other
parts of the report, therefore a simple statement that the taskforce
before coming to any conclusions on that question (if and when possible)
has to do more work on that, seems more appropriate.

page 27: in the "desirable" category this is not the case, only in the
less desirable and valueless categories there are significant
differences, which are easily explained, or have individual users the
same interest in the data that the other groups have ?


with regards

abel wisman


On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 01:31, Thomas Roessler wrote:
> [I'm copying this message to Alexander Svensson.  Alexander, could 
> you please try to make sure that this message and the latest draft 
> make it to as many members of the task force as possible before the 
> NC session?  Thanks.]
> 
> I just had a telephone discussion with Miriam Sapiro, in which we 
> went through the current state of the draft.  The resulting changes 
> can be found in the redlined version of the text which is available 
> at <http://does-not-exist.org/whois/>.
> 
> I'll walk you through the individual changes in this message. Page 
> numbers refer to the redlined PDF version.  Also, I'll limit myself 
> to the more substantial changes.  Minor corrections are left out.
> 
>  - On page 4, Miriam was afraid that the task force may overstep its 
>    mission by stating that it would "guide the development of policy 
>    considerations".  Half of the sentence was removed.
> 
>  - On page 5, the "finding" language was adopted, and "opt-in or 
>    more restrictive" was spelled out.  Also, Miriam argued that the 
>    sentence that the Task Force's findings support the preliminary 
>    findings was redundant.  Since I didn't come up with a better 
>    wording, I agreed to remove that sentence, but added a cautionary 
>    notice on behalf of myself.
>    
>  - On page 7, "uniform" was replaced by "systematic".
>  
>  - On page 8, the repetition of the number of governmental 
>    participants was removed, since this is elaborated on in more 
>    detail in the Statistical Considerations section.
>    
>  - On page 9, a note was added stating that "17% of those who 
>    answered the questionnaire did not register any domain names".
>    
>  - On page 10, registrar/registry users were added, and it was 
>    mentioned that a considerable fraction of respondents does not 
>    heavily use WHOIS.
>    
>  - On page 12, the numbers on governments and registrars/registries 
>    were adjusted based on numbers provided by Miriam, and fetched 
>    from the United Nations home page.  Also, a short note on the 
>    statistical implications was included.
>    
>  - On page 14, chapter II was renamed: Instead of "Requirements", 
>    it's now "Expectations".  (Miriam didn't like "requirements", and 
>    I didn't want to call the chapter just "User Experience", which 
>    would have been wrong.)
> 
>  - On page 21, a joint caveat was included, since there is really a 
>    whole lot still to be done. (This is question 5, for which we 
>    currently have unsufficient data.)
>    
>  - On page 22, another such caveat was added, concerning question 6, 
>    where privacy and technical aspects may be considered 
>    underrepresented in the text.
> 
>  - On page 24, there is a change from "each" to "this" which deserves 
>    explanation: In the original text from Laurence, she states that 
>    "Individual and ISP respondents were most likely to report very 
>    low estimates (68% in each category chose "under 5%")".  This 
>    seems to be a simple editorial error on Laurence's side: With ISP 
>    respondents, it's 58%.  However, the 68% and 58% figures are 
>    printed in a small font, and directly above each other.  For this 
>    reason, I had quietly dropped the ISP respondents when merging the 
>    documents.  I should have pointed this out earlier.
> 
>  - On page 27, there's another joint caveat: When staring at the 
>    numbers, one will notice that individual respondents are strongly 
>    deviating from other categories when it comes to information such 
>    as date of registration, or, most interesting, registrant 
>    information.
> 
>  - On page 30, the order of mention of names was changed to put Karen 
>    Elizaga first since (according to Miriam) she did most of the work 
>    on this chapter.
> 
>  - On page 42, a parenthesis is added which explains what's meant by 
>    "opt-in or stricter protection".
> 
>  - On page 45, the same parenthesis is removed.
> 
>  - On page 45, there's a caveat from the gTLDs that they would like 
>    to see it reflected that more than 1/3 of respondents in several 
>    categories would welcome advertising material from their choosen 
>    service provider.
> 
> If there are any questions or urgent comments, please feel free to 
> contact me via e-mail or phone.
> 
> To those in Ghana: Alexander has my phone number and can give it to 
> you if you want to call me.
> 
> -- 
> Thomas Roessler                        <roessler@does-not-exist.org>
> nc-whois document repository:     <http://does-not-exist.org/whois/>
-- 
Abel S.H. Wisman

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