Draft NCSG Charter (v4.0) - answers to your questions

[Cheryl Preston]

You ask:
"Q2: How does a constituency-based model apportion Council seats among Constituencies when they are of different size?"

Your proposed charter answers this complex question by imposing a simple majority election for all 6 GNSO council seats for the entire stakeholder group.  This model is highly unlikely to give voice to differing viewpoints.  The only represented interest is size.

You say, "And once Council seats depend on membership size, what is to stop one constituency from extending membership in an overly easy way, regardless of appropriate criteria, to inflate its relative size? Will the Board monitor this?"

This problem is actually exacerbated with your proposed charter.  Because all council seats are elected on the basis of a mere majority, regardless of representation of the views of different constituencies, the incentive is much greater for constituencies to "pad" their membership list and award greater vote numbers to people and organizations that should not qualify, given the amount of actual participation.  

This has been a consistent issue in NCUC.  I have asked for updated member lists to verify who votes and get no response.  Some of the organizations listed on the NCUC webpage cannot be found and apparently no longer exist.  And you have never answered my questions about why the Boulder Colorado publicity organization is listed as a member.  You won't send me a current member list or a list of who voted in an election and how their votes were weighed.  Vastly more votes are cast than the number of persons who post on the list in any given year.

In my Alternative Charter, I tried to introduce some controls and balances on exactly this problem.  You would not even discuss them.  So, if we lump the entire stakeholder group together under your proposal and have all council seats and the chair subject to mere majority votes, the Board will have a lot more monitoring to do. 

If it is unfair to let one constituency in the non-commercial stakeholder group have some allocation of council seats notwithstanding its smaller size, why wouldn't it be unfair to have a equal representation from a stakeholder group that is smaller than another.  Under your analysis, the only right solution would be to have the all of the GNSO seats allocated according to numbers of participants.  I assume that would mean, at this point, no seats for the non-commercial stakeholders at all.

We do know how a constituency model will work.  That has been the model used in the GNSO for years.

As to geographical representation, the problem you describe will be true for each constituency around the entire GNSO house.  To solve it, all of the seats would have to be allocated based on the entire group.  For years, NCUC has had three seats and thus only a slightly greater chance for diversity than you describe.  If all the constituencies had picked representatives from the same two or three countries, the problem would have been the same.  But you didn't complain about this model until you were asked to share seats with other constituencies.

Could you please forward to the list the current draft of your proposal and the staff comments (and a membership list, pllleeaase)?  Thanks.





Cheryl B. Preston
Edwin M. Thomas
Professor of Law
J. Reuben Clark Law School
Brigham Young University
434 JRCB
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-2312
prestonc at lawgate.byu.edu

>>> Milton L Mueller <mueller at SYR.EDU> 2/6/2009 12:39 pm >>>


Robert, Denise and Ken
Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback on our draft Charter (v4.0). It is clear that we are making progress, although there is a long way to go. 

In respect to some of your questions or requests for explanation, let me turn the tables on you a bit. The presumption in many of these exchanges is that there's something complicated or "different" about what we are proposing, and that the "constituency-based SG model" is straightforward and poses no problems. In many ways, however, an integrated SG structure is far simpler, and we have no idea how a constituency model would work even if we thought it desirable to implement it.

Let me give you two examples. I will pose them in the form of questions because i genuinely would like to have answers from you or any other defender of the constituency-based SG model.

Q1: How does a constituency-based model produced balanced geographic representation in Council seats? 

Think about this. Let's say there are 3 independent constituencies in a SG, and each of them elects 2 Council seats without reference to the other. So Constituency A elects (in accord with its own geog. representation rules) a person from North American and a person from Latin America; Constituency B elects a person from North America and a person from Latin America; and Constituency C elects a person from North America and another from Latin America. End result: each constituency has, on its own, produced as much geographic diversity as it possibly could, and yet the end result could be that only two world regions are represented on the Council. \

I would be very interested to see how you propose to avoid this problem while staying in the constituency model.
An integrated SG model, by contrast, can impose proportions on the six seats as a whole, thereby ensuring that most if not all regions are represented. 

Q2: How does a constituency-based model apportion Council seats among Constituencies when they are of different size?

Let's suppose there is an "old constituency" that has 50 members, and a "new" constituency that starts and gets recognized by the Board, and has only 10 initial members (or even less). How many Council seats does each constituency get? Do they inherently get the same number of seats simply by virtue of the fact that they are constituencies? Or does their representation on the Council reflect their relative size? If the latter, who decides what allocation principle is used, when there is no pre-established SG decision-making method? And once Council seats depend on membership size, what is to stop one constituency from extending membership in an overly easy way, regardless of appropriate criteria, to inflate its relative size? Will the Board monitor this? 

These questions are not impossible to answer, but they obviously impose a very complex layer of organization, monitoring and procedure that an integrated SG model does not have to worry about. 

Frankly, Bob and Denise, I could produce about a dozen more questions like this. But let's see how you do with these two first. 

My point is to put this discussion of SG models on a more solid footing with an equal burden of proof. If you can convince us that a constituency-based model handles such basic and obvious issues as well as an integrated model, we'd be more inclined to change our view. 

--MM
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