Karl,
> Remember the voice afforded by General Membership is merely to elect
> directors. It isn't comparable SO membership.
>
...
> The notion of thinking that a body of individual voters is going to be
> able to overbalance the focused and concentrated power of the SO
> memberships is, to my mind, rather unlikely.
>
> So yes, the potential is there, but, in my opinion, the reality isn't.
>
Kent adds,
> That argument applies just as much to all the other directors.
> There is no a priori reason why *any* group of the directors would
> "speak with a single voice". It is extremely unlikely; and it is
> highly undesirable, that *any* group of the directors "speak with
> a single voice", *including* the AL directors.
>
> "Speaking with a single voice" is equivalent to "capture".
It's a fine state of affairs when the very prospect of everyone
actually agreeing on somehting is explicitly shunned!
*Of course* it is an ideal and a 'potential' and extremely unlikely to
be found in practice -- does that make it less of an organizing
principle? ( If y'all wanted a board which *guaranteed in writing*
perpetual wrangling and fractiousness, why didnt you say so in the
beginning? It would have made everything a lot easier - now I guess
you'll have to form a Wranglers Constituency...)
=====
> As we know from all of these "discussions", the chance of anything
> even approximating unaniminity is pretty small, vanishing small
> I'd say.
===
> > > If 2(e) and 2(f) were removed then there would be more of a sense of
> > > balance.
> > >
> > > But those sections are there, and as long as they are there the locus of
> > > policy formation is in the SO's.
> > >
> > For my part, I'd rather have Bylaws amended by an elected board rather than
> > (to use a word I learned today) an inchoative one.
>
> The current board is doing a lot of substantive decision making. They
> should take a break and do something easy, like removing language
> that their legal advisor indicates is both meaningless and misleading.
>
I think they can see its at least as easy to construct a
hypothetical situation in which the BoD would then (after such
amendments) be castigated for *not taking an SO proposal as read
-- and it would be their butts on the line to dry. (At the moment,
even their breathing on the Bylaws might be slightly suspect in
some Committees...)
As it stands, VI.2.e may be ambiguous; I dont know - but it's
misleading only when some decision is misled by it. Why not wait
till such a decision is discovered, and in the meantime, think about
something easy, like issues? ;-)
===
> Yes, we need to find "answers". They've almost certainly been part of the
> ebb and flow of discussion over the last three+ years.
>
> I would personally say "multiple roots" are good, but there should be
> but one master source (registry) for each TLD with portability among
> registrars. And I'd allow for the creation of TLD subsets,
> i.e. community views that reduce the content of a TLD for some
> community that choses to limit is view of the net. (Ie. for things
> like filtering out sites specializing in content they don't like.)
>
Arent these issues on which *some degree of indiv/ non-c
consensus might be reached? *Some policy regarding how and
when and how many and so on enunciated? Isn't this list a good
place to work on that?
> Is it too much to demand that we have, at least, parity with commercial
> and trademark interests?
>
> Process is important. He/she who controls process often can dictate
> the outcome of a particular issue.
>
A slight amendment: Who *understands the process will dictate
the outcome -- but I'm glad to see you accept that particular issues
are going to be the focus, every time. (I trust I'm not dictating your
agreement!). Let's get process built around that - and then we will
have something by which to define parity.
kerry
