IP: Parallel Processing Democracy

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

[ David Johnson is a partner in the Washington, D.C. firm of Wilmer, Cutler
and Pickering.
He represents NSI but has been involved in the ICANN debate for some time in
various capacities and offers this only as his personal opinion.  djf]

From: "Johnson, David" <DJohnson () Wilmer COM>
To: "'David Farber'" <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 21:50:30 -0400

Parallel Processing Democracy

By: David R. Johnson

> From the time of the Athenian agora, we've been coming together, in real
time and real space meeting rooms, to do the public's business. Sure, there
have always been "back channels." Most of the interesting deals may get done
in the "cloak room." But Federalist 10 spent a lot of time defending the
U.S. Constitution by explaining how to create a suitably sized "deliberative
body" that might meet regularly, in person, stay free of dominating factions
and, well, deliberate.

As usual, the Net is about to change the way public business gets done. The
key new thing is not that you can now send an email to your congresscritter
-- she still won't read it. It's not even that the legislature can vote
electronically (the new "digital signature" legislation was, reportedly,
signed electronically and sent by email to the White House). The important
change is that the real time, physical meeting room is dissolving away
entirely. Our public dialogue will become a series of parallel electronic
discussion threads. These will still involve "deliberation," will lead to
important decisions, and will reflect our needs for collective action. But
they won't be easily observed from a public gallery, can't readily be
followed by the press, and don't integrate easily into the real time/real
space public meetings that remain.

Suitably, the new Internet governance system being created under the
sponsorship of the Department of Commerce epitomizes the new problems posed
by this partial virtualization of democratic debate. The Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is building a complex
structure designed to engage experts and end users, service providers and
public interest groups, in a search for consensus on how to deal with issues
such as "cybersquatting" (registering a domain name in bad faith for the
purpose of holding up a trademark owner). The Domain Name Supporting
Organization (DNSO) of ICANN now meets, most of the time, online -- via
endless, proliferating, discussion lists among subcommittees, councils,
working groups, critics, constituencies, and a "general assembly."

Unlike real world legislatures, this "General Assembly" of the DNSO
(consensus among which is supposed to lead to ICANN policies) is an open
body with no capitol building. It's only required to meet physically once a
year -- an eternity between "meetings" in Internet time. Because it is open
and meets infrequently, one insider recently suggested that the General
Assembly should be defined as the Internet discussion list, conducting its
business online. When the group meet in Santiago, Chile, most recently,
fully half of those "in attendance" logged in electronically.

There were some obvious problems with integrating an essentially online
group with a meat space meeting. First, those actively engaged on the lists,
where the real work does (or, often, doesn't) get done, had to spend lots of
time reporting to the offline crowd about what had happened in all the
online discussions. When it came time for questions from the floor, the half
of the audience attending electronically had a hard time getting recognized.
It's not easy, online, to raise your hand or shout out from the back of the
room. When a "consensus" vote was called, the Chair forgot all about the
online crowd and called for a show of hands, many of which were raised by
students attending the meeting. The offline crowd couldn't tell whether
those who couldn't afford to travel to Santiago had views differing
systematically from those who could.

The online meeting spaces created by ICANN's subgroups are having their own
problems. Because Robert's Rules of Order don't map well to a discussion
list, many feel all too few have much to much to say. Email filters can
reduce time spent reading nonsense or flames. But the Net's low barriers to
entry have increased noise levels -- and driven many responsible players
away. The Board of ICANN almost never shows up for online meetings. Most
never post, even though the substantive discussions online are among the
best materials contributed to the dialogue -- far better, at their best,
than anything offered at a real time meeting.

The very notion of a "public" dialogue may change radically under the
pressures and possibilities offered by the online world. Some press came to
Santiago to cover the ICANN meetings. But most didn't attend the online
discussions, where most of ICANN's business is, or ought to be, done. So how
could they report the real story? If they watch only the physical meeting,
they'll disenfranchise the online community. If they don't read the
impassioned speeches delivered online, or the deals developing on multiple,
dispersed, discussion lists, the public (which can't possibly afford to
follow all of this) won't know how the public business at hand is really
being done.

Every corporation also faces this new phenomenon, in its own way. Time
previously wasted in fact-to-face meetings can now more profitably be spent
developing decisions by email. No need to listen to the tedious speeches of
those who can't really influence the decision but want to prove they were
there. Instead of taking issues up in sequential order according to an
agenda, spending only a limited amount of meeting time on each decision, the
decision-making group can now proceed in parallel, taking as much time as
necessary to make a group decision on each discussion thread.

But we'll still have real meetings. Often involving those who haven't been
in the online discussion. How to integrate the two -- without losing the
benefits of either -- that's the rub.

The dilemma is most intense when those engaged in a meeting are doing so on
behalf of a broader public -- citizens or shareholders -- and where the
meetings themselves are a means of assuring accountability. The ICANN Board
has been under pressure to open its meetings. And it held a short dog and
pony show in Santiago. But the real decisions were clearly made in closed
processes -- Board dinners, conference calls, emails among small groups. The
"public/open" meeting involved no real debate, little dialogue. It avoided
all the controversial issues. And this was possible only because the cloak
room has become one click away in an online environment that the press has
not figured out how to open to public scrutiny.

Internet governance, Washington style, also suffers from the disconnect
between real space and the online world. It is costly to attend
congressional hearings -- so only lobbyists from big companies show up.
Government officials systematically disregard the views of small business
and netpreneurs, because these small guys -- who vastly outnumber the large
corporations, in aggregate and in terms of who creates the most jobs --
can't afford the time to show up. Big business always wins in meat space,
because it has the troops.

If our government ever decided to use the new online tools to engage in
asynchronous conferencing, to switch over wholeheartedly to virtual
meetings, would we sacrifice accountability? Not necessarily, as long as the
discussions were open for inspection. It's easier to search the archives of
a discussion group than it is to attend a "real" meeting. You can analyze
the electronic record to see who is dominating the discussion, exercising
leadership, supporting the party line. When court dockets and filings go
online (as some have already done), the public's right to access to the
courthouse will become a lot more meaningful.

In the corporate world, electronic shareholder meetings offer the prospect
of increased accountability. One can imagine parallel online sessions in
which shareholders discuss the performance of the board, and the flaws in
the annual report, among themselves. They might even have "time" to ask
questions of management.

But as these online fora fragment into sub-threads, will the basic idea of a
"public meeting" itself survive? To be sure, no one will be forced to listen
to worthless rantings on unwelcome subjects. Then again, no one will be
forced to listen to worthless rantings on unwelcome subjects! As a "public"
-- as citizens, netizens, shareholders or members of the PTA -- we need to
deliberate from time to time in the "committee of the whole." We need to
hear a dialogue that represents the sense of the entire community.

As we build truly global institutions, time zone considerations alone (as
well as travel costs, the shortness of time as measured against the speed of
change, etc.) will dictate that our public dialogues must occur online,
asynchronously. Not as a half-baked real video "look in" on a room filled
only with those who can afford to travel. But how will journalists, and
members of the relevant public, decide where to look online for those open
dialogues that best reflect and form our collective values and most reliably
lead to legitimate collective action?

Maybe we need a way to label some online meetings as more important than
others -- more formal, more dignified and more likely to be undertaken as an
exercise in reflecting the views of the community. Maybe we need a way to
put the online crowd on its best digital behavior from time to time. We
cannot (online) magnify a solemn meeting of the global tribe by gathering
large crowds at the same time in a real space, using the magnificence of the
meeting room and fancy dress and rhetoric to show the greater importance of
any resulting discussion. The necessarily parallel processing of online
meetings destroys pomp and circumstance. But we still need to engage in high
public dialogue. We still need to be able to recognize those speeches that
authoritatively reflect our group consensus.

As usual, the internet engineers who gave us this problem will help to find
the solution. They will figure out how to show the complex, multidimensional
state of an online meeting at one glance. They will figure out how to tag
emails to allow the speaker to signify that he is speaking on behalf of a
larger group. They will build diagnostics to help us figure out when and
what to pay attention to online. They will build feedback loops (e.g.,
firefly) and editorial assessments (e.g., slashdot) that promote the most
important and valuable comments in our multi-tracked public discussions to
the top of the list. They will, perhaps, figure out how to project
asynchronous online discussions into a real time meeting -- and vice versa.
They will map Robert's Rules of Order to the screen, completely transforming
it in the process.

But the ultimate solution to the disappearance of the real time/real space
public deliberative body, as threatened by the parallel processing of the
Net, may be found not in technology but in redefining the roles we play
online to create a new form of public meeting. Now, when a Senator "takes
the floor," it is easy to tell that a public act is about to occur. We
attend to the committee meetings shown on CSpan because, even if a back room
deal explains the result, the public discussions shows us how those playing
public roles choose to articulate a persuasive rationale, and explain away
dissent. In short, we need more online meetings in which the relevant
agency, committee or board of directors is required to deliberate in public,
in a forum that others can download and watch.

Judging by the first ICANN "open" meeting, available to a few in-person
observers and recorded in archive on the net, we need more practice to
figure out how to have a debate that is both public and meaningful, solemn
yet extemporaneous, creative but not chaotic, orderly but not scripted.
Because the meeting was held in real time, the ICANN Board did not have the
opportunity to reflect on their remarks. Because it was broadcast on the
net, they felt they had to say the "right" thing. One director said later
that it felt like "being in a play."

A play is just what we need, if it is the play of thoughtful dialogue across
an online discussion among relevant representatives seeking to define the
public good. But we can't live with a scripted dialogue performed in front
of a small audience. And we don't have to live with unexplored questions and
undelivered answers, with issues short-changed because of the constraints of
a real time meeting. We can build an appropriately global and attentive
audience for any authoritative conversation that takes its time to unfold
over time, the way all our best thoughts now do, online. We can have much
more than online voting, we can have collective dialogue, if we insist that
some electronic conversations are more important than others. We can
reinvent the agora, relaxing the time constraint but not letting go of the
idea that we need a collective conversation in which some purport to speak
for all, while all concerned have an opportunity and right to listen.