Re: [atlarge-discuss] enough waiting for nothing

[espresso@e-scape.net]

At 12:45 -0800 2003/02/05, Jeff Williams wrote:
>  I personally find it difficult to understand why Judyth or any other
>member cannot grasp the basic concept that ICANNATLARGE.ORG
>and ICANNATLARGE.COM as has been already determined
>are NOT one in the same organizations.

Actually, neither of the two meets my definition of an
organization -- they're just Web sites, for X's sake!

>And are operated/managed
>by two entirely different sets or "Individuals", thereby making the
>"Voting Booth" associated with ICANNATLARGE.COM not
>in the determined interest of the legitimate members of
>ICANNATLARGE.ORG.

My point -- and it's a pretty common one in the business world
as well as on the 'Net -- was that organizations can and do
arrange to host some aspects of their activities externally
on another server or even contract out the running of a
particular application and just provide the link on the main
site.

The issue of who runs which application how reliably is a
separate one. At the moment, Joop runs ICANNATLARGE.COM
unilaterally and Vittorio seems to be running ICANNATLARGE.ORG
unilaterally insofar as it's being run at all.

Hence my resolution, which Hugh Blair was kind enough to
second, called for a vote to accept the Polling Booth as an
information-gathering tool and as a temporary means by
which we can break our stalemate and get on with the
organizing part.

>  Although the/Joops "Voting Booth" is a good idea, it is flawed for
>actual voting purposes as the actual audit records can be hacked
>too easily and thereby slanting any Poll or Vote according to whomever
>is in control of the "Voting Booth" which was demonstrated some time
>ago in the now defunct IDNO fiasco...

It was the ICANNATLARGE.ORG site which was hacked but I'm in
no position to evaluate the hackability of ICANNATLARGE.COM
as compared to some other site.

Just recently the New Democratic Party of Canada held its
leadership convention and for the first time allowed its members
to cast their ballots electronically using Elections.com,
which is theoretically professional at running such votes.
Some joker apparently decided to block access to the
balloting site and managed to delay things by about 45 minutes;
there seems to have been no vote-tampering, especially since
steps were taken to prevent it and to ensure proper scrutiny.

Call me a Luddite if you like but it's my belief that we can't
blame the computers or software if we do these things wrong
or insecurely. It's *always* up to the humans who decide how
a ballot will be conducted using what means, and it is (IMHO,
anyway) easier to devise a method of assigning unique
membership numbers offline and conveying them to the individuals,
letting the computers collect the ballots as they come in and
transfer them to another location -- not on the same server and
not easily accessible unless one both knows where to find the
data and how to hack into it. It's *always* important to make
sure that no individual has unmonitored access to the ballot-box
... which is why Canadian elections allow each political party
to send its own scrutineer to each polling-station to make sure
things stay honest. You can't stuff a physical ballot-box or
throw away valid ballots with impunity if people from the
other factions are watching you, and recounting of the physical
ballots by somebody else at the same table makes sure nobody
can fake the count.

Electronic voting is a lot trickier, I think, because it leads
to assumptions about the inherent impartiality and accuracy
of computers making close human scrutiny unnecessary. I don't
know how the commercial polling firms tamper-proof their systems
but obviously they're not always successful. If I were responsible
for an online voting system, I'd want at least two disinterested
parties keeping an eye on the incoming votes (and one another)
and maybe a techie monitoring other activity on the server to
make sure it didn't interfere with the ballots. BUT that can be
very expensive and surely we don't need it just to determine
what our members' priorities are -- this group is simply not
important enough for anyone outside it to put much energy into
falsifying the results of a poll!

Some may disagree with me here but the safest, least-manipulable
method for ballot-counting is to have a couple of humans charged
with checking that the unique ID on each ballot is used only once
and its point of origin corresponds to the contact information
in the membership database. Once ballots have been validated,
each should be printed with all identifying information but the
ID number removed, and the electronic original *erased* so it
can't be duplicated. The printed ballots can then be counted
in the presence of several trusted individuals who can, if they
like, recheck that ID numbers have not been duplicated or
invalid ones used as well as counting and recounting the votes
as needed. Once the results have been declared, the scrutineers
make sure all ballots are destroyed so as to prevent anyone
from stealing ID numbers to use in a future ballot.

Surveys are another matter entirely -- they are not necessarily
statistically representative of the public at large but they
can be useful for gauging "the sense of the meeting".

Yet another mechanism -- an open vote on this list -- is the
equivalent of asking for a show of hands at a physical meeting
to see what proportion of those present support a particular
resolution. However, it's also a means of having the entire
readership serve as scrutineers with a minimum of fuss:
everyone who gets the messages could choose to count the votes
for him- or herself, and the opportunities for voting twice
or using somebody else's identity are relatively few when
anyone can do a "reveal message headers" and see where a
vote really originated.

Jeff, I know you disagree with me about this but I think this
group has an immediate need for an interim decision-making
mechanism before we'd be in any position to collect money
for hiring non-members to run a properly-conducted vote for us.
Joop's polling-booth may not be perfect but it's affordable
and available now. Why not use it for unofficial purposes and
temporarily for official ones since we've no other means of
conducting them at the moment?

Joop, I am frankly thrilled to hear that over 235 members are
registered for the forum, and I hope most of them are going
to tell us all what they really want this group to become,
by any and all means we have available.

I confess I do not understand why "we" don't know how many
people are subscribed to this list, especially given that there
is a listowner who must have access to that information since we
are apparently to be switched over automatically to another ISP.
However, I would imagine there are some dozens of us involved if
all the lurkers were counted, and expect there would be quite
an overlap between the forum and the list.

To me, that means neither the forum nor the list includes the
whole membership since the previous count we were given was over
1000. Therefore, neither the forum nor the list is the appropriate
means of communicating to the whole membership. Only messages sent
to each individual member should be used for official purposes,
and only the Panel or its delegated Webmaster should have access
to the membership contact information at this point.

We can probably assume that there are between 200 and 300
members registered who care enough to vote, judging by the
last Panel election. By my reckoning, that should mean
that a resolution which obtained support from 20-30 members
should be added to the Interim Panel's agenda as requiring
a referendum of the whole membership ... assuming we intend
to follow the normal practice, which both Michael Geist and
David Farrar included in the bylaws they recommended to us.

This won't be a real organization until at least 10% of
us agree to get organized. Are we ready to try now?

Regards,

Judyth

##########################################################
Judyth Mermelstein     "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..."
Montreal, QC           <espresso@e-scape.net>
##########################################################
"A word to the wise is sufficient. For others, use more."
"Un mot suffit aux sages; pour les autres, il en faut plus."
##########################################################



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