Open and Transparent Democracy

["Rick H. Wesson" <wessorh@ar.com>]

all:

i know it has been a long time since i posted anything here, i've been 
traveling in central america for the past 4 months. i have been reading
the dnso list and would have liked to participate more, but central
america doesn't have much as far as internet infrastructure. i did learn
that participating in the DNSO from such a distant place (in internet
connectivity terms) is very difficult.

i spoke with many ISPs and IP providers in central america. the thing i
found is that it is very difficult to participate because of the time it
takes going to the meetings and reading the mail list. yes you have to go
to the meetings and be on the telephone calls if you want your piticular
view to be herd. i couldn't do that and many of the folks i talked to
wanted to participate but found that it would be too dificult. remember
most of you are from well connected countries or have been around the
internet for a long time. i talked to alot of clueless newbies that would
like to participate too. now we all know more folks need to participate
and the constituencys certanly do describe some vague groups. just how
many businesses on the net are there? well they all could want to
participate in the DNSO process, but we know only a fraction really will.

knowing the above, how is 'Open and Transparent Democracy' realy going to
happen? through email lists and confrence calls? well i've atempted to
create something that will help our democracy be a bit more clear.

for those that dont want to wait any longer, try
http://www.ar.com/otd/html/index.html

the long version: 

remember the PAB? well i was once the first PAB Co-Chair and after that i
was the vote taker for the PAB. I used Dan Burso's Voting package. After
running the last election for the PAB I learned alot about voting and just
how messed up a process can become. the software worked fine (thanks dan)
i was just confused by all the confusion of others that were not keeping
up in the PAB. I have atempted to creat an interactive version of a
balloting and voting process on the www.

what it does:

everything is open, if you register you can vote, you only get one
vote tho. you can belong to all the constituencys listed in the ICANN
proposed bylaws and there are e-mail lists for each constituency, of
cource the list is archived and a htmlized version is available w/o
having to become a member. you have to be a member to post to the 
list tho. members can create ballots, either with a html form which 
can create simple one question ballots, or with XML where complex
ballots can be created that ask many qustions with answers of the
following type: yes/no or multiple select list, or comments. I've created
a couple of ballots and they are available to look at and vote on. if
you vote on them (only members can vote) then the votes are calculated 
in real time and you can display a bar char to see how the vote is going.
for ballots that require comments, you can comment as many times as you
like and they are displayed all grouped togther.


Well, i hope you like the ideas i have presented above. i've been working
on this for well over a month. it was great fun too, writing software in
the middle of knowhere, where the beauty of nature could inspire me. well
the site is just a functional proof of consept. it still has bugs and lots
of little things need to be worked out. I wanted to present it to to you
all and get some feed back to see if this will help us create the DNSO
faster, i hopw it will.
 
I would like your comments, please mail me (rick@ar.com) with 
suggestions and bugs you find. I am heading for europe (paris)
tomarrow and probably won't be able to respond for a couple of days,
be patient and i'll do my best. for those europeans let me know where
you live and if you would like a visit, i'd love to be shown around 
your town =)

the site is called OTD (Open and Transparent Democracy) i hope it is
usefull and helps this process move allong better.

http://www.ar.com/

-rick
 
ps i'm dislexic, and don't spell check anything... just so you know =)