Re: POC membership [was : Re: The Price of Admission is...]

["andi payn" <payn@null.net>]

Jeff Williams:
>> > >   Will the method of selecting ISP representitives be posted
>> > > or the gTLD-MoU site?

Amadeu Abril i Abril:
>> Not aonly that, Jeff. As for the whole process YOU are asked what your
preferred
>> mix would be. Last Saturday iPOC issued a Request for Comments (or
whatever you
>> want to call it) asking YOU (yes, you too, Jeff) ideas about iPOC
compostion.
>> Please note that we don't only ask for "how many ISP reps should be
there" of
>> "how many Canadians" (or Catalans, for that matter) but rahter ask your
views
>> on:

I am very happy about the two RFCs that iPOC has posted, asking for comments
on how POC should be structured and what the initial set of new gTLDs should
be. I'm working on comments now, and I'd hope that everyone who is critical
of the current MoU structure any thinks there's any point to working on it
will do the same.

I'll comment here on Jeff's preliminary comments.

Jeff Williams:
>  Any and all users are constituencies.  There are 3 to 4 classes.  They
>are Domain name holders, General users(those whom have an E-Mail
>address),
>other commercial, and educational.

Existing domain name holders are an important class that I think they forgot
to mention in the RFC. They do include end users, and various classes of
commercial entities. I think that educational entities may be able to fit in
the categories they included, but it might be worth giving them separate
representation.

>> * How the reps of your preferred classes shpuld be nominated
>
>  They should be elected not nominated from their industry class or
>group.

I think a two-step process, as used in many democratic elections, might be
better. First, any interested party within the class could put forth
nominations on the gTLD-MoU site. Anyone with two nominations would then be
entered into the elections.

>> * How should they be elected.
>
>  In a general election on the gTLD-MoU site.

I'd have a simple form listing all nominees (from the first step above) and
a write-in slot. Each entity (person, commercial entity, etc., depending on
class) gets one vote. There is some question as to how to very fair
elections in such a vote.

For individual voting, the issue is complicated by the fact that a single
person can have more than one email address (e.g., multiple screen names on
AOL, Hotmail mailboxes, iName forwarding addresses, addresses from multiple
departments in a University, even just multiple mail hosts on the same
network, etc.). It's just as possible to have multiple "verifiable"
addresses whether you're using signed PGP keys, First Virtual, etc. For
example, I have three different machines that I run Netscape from, and each
one "uniquely" verifies me as a different person. I also have multiple email
addresses and PGP keys for all of them. For that matter, if we use, say,
Netscape's unique verification, what happens to people who can't run
Netscape 3 or 4 (e.g., users of MkLinux, AmigaOS, DOS, etc.) or just don't
have a copy?

For organizational voting, there's a question of how to qualify
organizations. If I have a personal dba, does it qualify as a company? What
if I have three? What if a company has multiple divisions that are
incorporated separately?

I don't think that these issues are unsolvable, but they're clearly a
problem that we have to start working on now.