Re: [ICANN-EU] fyi: What's wrong with ICANN...

["Jeanette Hofmann" <jeanette@medea.wz-berlin.de>]

Dear Alexander, sorry for being so slow


> thanks for pointing to the Johnson/Crawford article. 
> It raises a central ICANN issue: *Shall ICANN's main goal 
> be the consensus?*

Nope, I don't think so. 
Consensus is a means to get something done in a democratic way. 
Hierarchical decisions would be the other option  ;-)

> In various articles Jeanette Hofmann has pointed out how 
> IETF deals with the famous 'rough consensus' and how 'political' 
> decisions are viewed. It would be interesting to hear from people 
> who actually /participate/ in the ICANN/DNSO process, namely 
> Roberto Gaetano and Marc Schneiders (forgive me if I overlooked 
> someone). Frankly, it often seems to me there is no consensus 
> whatsoever on some important DNSO issues. It's by far easier to 
> decide what's off-topic on an IETF mailing list; that's why it's 
> by far easier to disturb an ICANN mailing list. 

Perhaps this depends on the rules as defined by the community. The 
larger a constituency, the more strict you have to be in order to keep 
things going. This is one of the lessons that I learned by observing the 
IETF: The degree of formalization is steadily increasing. As an open 
community like the IETF that attracts the participation of more an more 
people, there is hardly any other choice than to stick to rigid rules.


It has taken months just
> do decide about the election rules.

Isn't this always the trade-off? Democratic decision-making takes 
longer, hierarchical decision-making is comparatively quick but less 
legitimate and always in danger to be hampered - especially on the 
Net ;-)

 So my question is: Does it make
> sense to call *only* for a consensus- building, bottom-up process and
> how do we deal with that whenever this process fails? In fact, the
> people working against ICANN often seem to outnumber the ones working
> constructively when you measure it by presence on the relevant lists.

I agree, there is bad signal-to-noise ratio on many lists. In my view, 
the right question then would be how to improve the ratio. Again, there 
is no reason to reinvent the wheel. I am not sure how far this would 
actually go, but if we accept the IETF as a model, there is a lot to 
learn about the management of decision-making. 

jeanette