On Tue, August 30, 2011 3:12 pm, Avri Doria wrote: > 4. the Charter we just accepted says: > >> All NCSG votes will be held using an online voting system to be >> determined, approved and supervised by the NCSG-EC. > > So we would need a charter amendment process to do this. > > But we do need to do something to ensure greater participation. As best I can tell from observation, the main problem was primarily a matter of individual active members not recognizing the balloting system for what it was -- some form of "technical" lack of capacity on their part. So, I would try to address this head-on. If I were designing a "failsafe" method, I would require members to "check-in" with the online balloting system *itself*, directly, somehow, as a *requirement* to maintain active membership in the first place. This would presumably ensure that they have in fact "tooled up" with the individual capacity to recognize and respond to the balloting system, for when a live, time-constrained election comes around. That is, I would not use the SG and/or constituency e-lists for such communication; at least I wouldn't recognize such participation in any official/formal membership capacity. If we had problems getting people to check-in with the balloting system, then (1) we can focus on resolving those technical problems with those individuals, and (2) any such individual cases that are not in fact resolved at the time of an election would at least not threaten the voting requirements for the SG as a whole. (It could erode the participatory representation of the group, to be sure, but that seems a lesser of evils as compared to whether the group "exists at all" in the ICANN system.) It's all about "critical pathways" in the design of the bureaucracy, and ensuring that such design is coherent and not potentially self-defeating. I don't know if such a process would require modifying anything in the charter, but if so I think we should figure out the best way to design the system and then modify the charter to match. Dan -- Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.