Re: [wg-review] GA - Member ID and Record keeping rules

[Sandy Harris <sandy@storm.ca>]

"Cade,Marilyn S - LGA" wrote:
> 
> Sandy, I understand your view about participating anonymously, but I am not
> sure that I agree. There has to be some accountability for opinions
> expressed when those are being used to guide policy positions which affect
> an infrastructure, such as the Internet.

Part of the accountability is attatched to the name, or anonymous nym, used.
Whether it is

	an address at an employer,
	a home account at some ISP,
	a free account at Hotmail,
or	an anonymous account somewhere

does not matter as much as the reputation attached to that posting address. 

	If that person routinely posts sensible things, I'll take their next
	   post more seriously.
	If they're routinely idiotic, I may not read the next post.
	If they're always on the other side of issues, I'll read it carefully
	   but skeptically, ready to argue.

None of that varies much for the type of account they post from. Some; for
example I'd take a Hotmail poster less seriously than one from a "real" address,
either home or work.

Besides, we're nearly anoymous anyway. I'm posting from sandy@storm.ca. That
does not reliably tell you my name's Sandy, or that I'm in Canada. As it happens,
both of those are true, but for all you know, this account could belong to Bruce
and Sheila, telnetting in from Australia.
 
> I do agree that individuals should be able to express their own views; and I
> think that there are many who are active in ICANN who do that, and say, my
> opinions are not necessarily those of my employer.

With a reasonable employer, that's enough, but I see no reason to assume all
employers will be reasonable, or that this is the only application for
anonymity.
 
> However, if we don't have some mechanism to verify/authenticate that a vote
> is from a legitimate member, we don't' have a working solution.

Notice that we've switched from talking about discussion and workgroup
participation to talking about voting.

Having made that switch, I agree with part of your statement. We cannot have a
useful system based on voting without authentication of legitimate voters.

However, from that you conclude that we need authentication. I conclude that
majority rule by voting are impractical here.

Authentication is clearly necessary for such a system. However, I'm not certain
such authentication it is either possible or reasonable. Moreover, even if we
work out the details of authentication, we would still need a few other rather
tricky things:

	acceptance of the notion that voting, rather than consensus, is the
	  appropriate mechanism here
	an accepted definition of "legitmate" in this context
	decision on one vote per domain vs one per user vs. ...
	dealing with the language issue so millions of people are not
	  summarily disenfranchised

My current take on this is that we are far enough from solutions to any of
those problems that talk of using voting for anything more than electing
at-large directors is just silly.

> Perhaps there can be co-existence, with a place to post anonymous comments.
> And votes can be counted, verified that they come from a legitimate member,
> but not ascribed.. That is how you voted can be private.  Counted by a
> neutral third party.
> 
> Are there options like that that make sense to you?

Likely, but if so no-one's defined them yet.
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