[address-policy-wg] PDP issues

Subject altered to reflect that this is not about 2015-01 anymore

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 01:02:41PM +0200, Gert Doering wrote:
>Now, if on the last day, a number of people nobody has ever
>heard of show up, from freemail accounts, and send "-1"s without
>any arguments, I think you can understand that it's a bit hard
>to see whether these are people legitimately concerned with
>specific reasons why they do not like the proposal, or just
>straw men.  I can't tell, so I won't dismiss the mails summarily
>- but when judging the overall result, this certainly will
>influence the way we look at them.

I've long suspected that sock-puppetry is not confined to one
side of this and other policy debates. As far as IPv4 is
concerned, this will get worse, not better. At the moment the PDP is
skewed towards "proposals are good-by-default and the pro
argument doesn't need to be articulated"; I do not think this is
the correct way. Most proposals have some "rationale against" and
a "-1" can just as easily be construed to mean "I agree with the
rationale against and therefore oppose the proposal". 
So I believe both sides should be required to argue their point.

>No.  Voting can be even more easily rigged than consensus
>building on a public mailing list.

The only issues I can see are

- the NCC, as the overseeing body could influence the vote
- Proxy voting, perhaps that could be disallowed for policy
  votes.

>(For a start, it's totally impossible to define who is entitled
>to vote, and how you get a represenative part of the community
>to actually vote)

That one is in the AoA, afaik; full members in good standing
are.
The turnout at the last GM vote was roughly 5% but, at 500-ish it
is still vastly more than the few people on this mailing list.

Perhaps a dual strategy would be in order: consensus on the ML
plus a membership vote on policies that affect members' business.
(Yes, I'm aware this would be a pretty fundamental change and
likely to slow down the PDP some)

rgds,
Sascha Luck