Re: [registrars] GNSO vote

[Amadeu Abril i Abril <Amadeu@nominalia.com>]

Ross said mong many other things:

 > Are there specific rules or procedures that allow Council reps
 > to vote their as they see fit instead of voting according to
 > the instructions of the constituency?

Both your implicit position /they should not) and your previous 
suggestion that the three Names Council reps should cast their votes 
spitting them 2/3 for Mike and 1/3 for Alex for any time they were in 
the run seem a bit exaggerated IMHO.

For one thing, and this is perhaps a linguistic/cultural devide, I was 
surprised at your interpretation of the meaining of a "representative". 
In our political cultures, there is a clear distinction between a 
representative and a delegate. Tha latter has a "mandate" to do whtever 
the ones giving the delegation might wish. In most European 
Constitutions in fact there is an express prohibition of the 
representatives (Cogressmen and the like) being subject to any 
"delegation", to any mandate by their electors. This is what we call, 
precisely, "representative democracy". No mandate, but obligation to 
represent the interests.

Use of different cultural meanings of "representation" aside, ang going 
a level daown to the ICANN/GNSO structure, I think that the distinction 
makes perfeclysense. The GNSO has to express the views of the GNSO, not 
only the sum of the views of the different constituencies. The Names 
Council should therefore try to aggregate those view, and, well, it is a 
fact of life that this could never be done if the different Council 
members were bound to dead to the (supposed) votes in one direction or 
another given by the constituency.

If we elect them is to serve the interests of our consituency, not 
necessarily to follow the strict literal content of a given resolution 
or vote.

One level down, again: if this is true, IMHO and my view of 
representation in general and GNSO in particular, it is even more so if 
we talk about "indications", strawsman votes, "general sense". Etc. The 
preferences for the Board candidates was, precisely, a show of 
preferences. Your request of how thye reps should vote was your 
perception of the "general opinion", seconded by a handfull of registrars.

It deosn't matter whwether all of them agrteed or not. It fails short to 
any standard of binding mandate, let's agree at least on that.

Now let mes say waht I wanted to write before the elections started. I 
firmly oppose your proposal that the Names Council reps votes as a 
robot, in any automatic way. I'll try to explain why.

On a practical side, the Names Council, let's admit it, is a strange 
political beast. You don't need to read the ICANNwathc piece Paul has 
pointed to in order to believe it ;-) There are, how would I say this, 
errr, lots of Marilyn Cades, Milton Muellers and other human beings 
which, when they interact, produce strange realtionships. Adopting any 
pre-stablished "blind" mechanism like the one you prooposed only leads 
to increased horse-trading around you. The message we sent our reps in 
this consituency was: try to get Mike, we like it more than Alex, but 
then we like both of them much more than any other. At least, this is my 
interpretation.

Now, if you go there and decide beforehand that you will split votes 
that way all over the vote, you will see things like the ones that most 
probably happened: other Council members dropping their favorite 
candidates just trying to "prevent" somebody else to win. Vote 
aggragation "against" candidates happens in the Names Council much more 
often than aggragation "for a candidate. History shows that this was 
precisel y what heppened so far for "all" previous Board elections. A 
pity, certainly , but it works that way.

Under these circumstances and you have two candidates, and you split 
votes from the beginning, you risk "both" candidates bieng easily 
outnumbered by a "countercoalition".

Moreover, it often happens that each consituency has his own candidate, 
different form the other ones, but many might share a common "second 
choice", while frankly not wanting some f the other candidates. Your 
proposed mechanism would lead to this more generally preferred second 
choice eliminated, and then facing a choice among probably worse 
chices..... (if my recollection of the facts is not incorrect, it was 
precisely the decision of the registrars reps back in 99 to change the 
support of their number 1 pick, err, me, to their number 3, Alex, that 
eventually allowed them to put in the Board their whole slate of 
candidates).

My message is: the registrars should expect their reps within the Names 
Council to do their best to get Mike, and then probalby Alex, to the 
Board in preference to any other candidate. But they should trust Ken, 
Bruce and Tom to be clever and honest enough to know how they should 
behave as for the mechanics of the elections of the 2 seats.

If the consituency does not trust them, or dislike its methods, then the 
registrars should try to remove them form office. But their job is 
precisely interpeting how to get to the consituency goals with the Names 
Council procedures and realities.

For the record: the registrar constituency is the only one that managed 
to get all of their supoorted candidates to the Board, in all four 
previous elections (well, in 2001 theconsituency and the reps were 
somehow split between Paul and myself, so ti was imposible to have it 
all with only one seat....).

On another line, and this was in fact the reason that moved me to write 
this, the real drama in these and past elections is that, precisely, the 
Names Council fails to act as such. The discussions happen only at the 
constiuency level, and then, in all consituncies there is a pressure to 
get the reps trying to defend its interests. As I said when I told the 
Council that I was not running again, it would be really important for 
the credibility of the GNSO and the quality of the elections that the 
GNSO, and therefore the Names Council would be able to discuss as such 
about the names, the profiles etc. No way. Unfortunalty they are still 
cpative of this sort of "constituency" war, with no dialogue at the 
Council level, ecept for some horse trading :-(

If we view the Names Council as s simple arithmetic sum of the wishes of 
each individual constiuency, let's sack al the Council members and let's 
use a simple, mechanical addition of consitucny votes. My bet is that we 
would see even more deadlocks that we see today....

You see, some favor that Names Council should closely follow consituncy 
votes, polls, and even mail threads as simple delegates. Others, like 
me, would like having a Names Council that takes itself much more 
seriously than it does today, and is really up to the task of agregating 
and mediating veiws beyond the strict view of the most vocal members of 
each constituency. Because we should not forget that, while this 
consituency is alive and, has an evident incientive of representing the 
views of parties bieng genuinely interested in the ICANN process 
(without which, accredited generic doamin-name registrrs would simply 
not exist) some ohter consituencies are no more of the political arm of 
a very, very tiny fraction of individuals who use it for strict 
political reason.

As for the results of the election, I will cngratulate whoever wins ;-)

Amadeu, in his personal capacity