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[Rouben <rouben AT rouben.net>]

Good point, Matthias. I thought of this as well. On the flip side, if you intend to propose and run a TLD, as per OpenNIC wiki:
https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/creating_new_tlds

- you have to have successfully operated a T2 server for at least 3 months before being eligible to start a vote

- you must agree to operate a T1 server (presumably in addition to the above T2 server) indefinitely (or as long as you want your TLD to live).

Now think of the costs of operating 2 public DNS servers, a T2 and T1 (including admin time, even if it's not actual money... how much if *your* time worth that you could spend on other things/people in your life?). I'd say easily $200/year.

From this perspective, maybe $200/election is not so bad? This excludes people whose monthly salary is close to that amount of course (e.g. some parts of Eastern Europe/ex-Soviet bloc)? As I said before, I don't know how to solve this issue...

Philosophically and ethically I also don't see an issue with having to charge people for elections... even the GPL doesn't stop you from charging users for costs of distributing the software (e.g. media publishing or hosting costs).

Rouben

On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 7:44 PM, Matthias Merkel <matthias AT boltn-hosting.com> wrote:

I think it is a good reason to use a proper system however we may want to use something free. Strawpoll might even work fine. 200$ could prevent poor people from proposing TLDs while favouring companies and rich people which can easily afford it.

On Mon, Jan 1, 2018, 1:37 AM Rouben <rouben AT rouben.net> wrote:

I’m afraid I cannot comment on most of the items gitgud mentioned, however, one thing I will agree on is the fact that mailing list voting can be problematic. Obviously, it has worked for years, however, it also has the potential to become contentious in certain situations as we’ve all seen.

Therefore I want to float the following idea by the members of the list...

1. We get a proper online voting system. I mean a proper system, not something we can cobble together from existing code that does something similar... I mean a mature, supported system.

2. I am personally in favour of going with a commercial system for the following reasons:

a) it will a third party system, not operated by any of our members, and will therefore be “impartial” vs. if it was operated by an OpenNIC member.

b) a commercial system will most likely require some sort of payment. This financial obligation should be fronted by those calling the election as a sign of good faith that they are serious.

I know of one we’d used at work for student council elections, called simplyvoting.com that charge per election $200US per 250 registered voters (how many members do we have?) There are countless others, I am just providing an example.

I am sure you’d be able to think of counterpoints to this. One I can think of is that for some members, the voting system fees may not be affordable for whatever reason... e.g. for residents of some Eastern European countries $200 may be closer to one’s monthly salary and therefore be completely unaffordable. Since OpenNIC is open to everyone, this may be an obvious issue. Not sure how to solve it.

3. Finally, for the members that are more democratically purist, I want to highlight that online voting itself is imperfect, and there are good reasons why a lot of governments still use an old school paper ballot system. This video covers the challenges: https://youtu.be/w3_0x6oaDmI

However, a dedicated, purpose built online voting system is surely better than a mailing list (i.e. no system at all).

So I am curious on these 2 topics, in principle and in practice:

1. What do you think of a dedicated voting system?

2. How do you feel about going with a commercial, third-party operated system that the proposal initiators would need to (potentially) pay for, say, per election?

Rouben

On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 18:26 <gitgud AT tfwno.gf> wrote:

As is probably obvious by now, with the vote for .front concluded, the
resolution
to approve .front as a top level domain has failed. In a tally of 14 YES
- 14 NO,
the motion has failed to achieve a simple majority of support in the
mailing list.

There's a lot to get into, but to start, I will fully admit that I have
been less
than stringent about the "official procedure" of this vote. As it
stands, the voting
rules in place are nebulous, lack comprehensiveness, and leave a lot of
responsibility
to the person who puts forward the proposal. This is nobody's fault, as
not much has
actually come through the mailing list in a while, but is likely an
oversight that will
need to be addressed in the future. If I took liberties during the
proceedings,
it is because I found them necessary to take and the members of the
community I talked
with were largely comfortable with me doing so.

There was a certain point in this vote when I asked one voter, Philipp
Schafft, to clarify
an invalid vote he had cast during this vote. Philipp, a Tier One
operator and key member of
the organization, used the opportunity to step onto a soap box and claim
that his actions and
his right to them were a pillar of democratic values that must not be
infringed, and that my
request that he "fix" his vote was an assault on these values. That
everything I had done was
invalid and undemocratic, and that I had in some way violated the sacred
"democracy" of OpenNIC.

On a vote as contentious as .front's has been, I wagered that Philipp
would perhaps want the opportunity
to think and respond more critically on the vote than he had, especially
with his considerable position
in the organization. In whatever misguided way I figured the decision
validated the request, I was
trying to be polite and give him an opportunity he might have taken for
granted earlier in the vote at
our proverbial round table.

OpenNIC is not a state, but an organization. Perhaps in a democracy that
governs a nation and not
servers, Philipp would have a point about "freedom of speech", the
importance of his ability
to cast an inane vote, and the required inflexibility of the rules in
place. But this isn't a parliament
or a state house, but a mailing list for an alternative DNS. More
importantly, this is an organization
where flexibility is not just the norm, but an outright sanity measure
that makes working on this project
bearable.

Meanwhile, despite a lengthy comment period of over a months, few of the
users that participated in
the vote ever commented or suggested amendment to the proposal, simply
showing up to voice their
disapproval of this addition to the proposal. Some in the IRC had not
even read the proposal,
and were under the impression that the proposal had nothing to do with
its stated objective.
Admittedly, this is their right; still, I can't help but regard a lot of
the opposition and
even a lot of the support as "arbitrary" since it was afforded scarce
attention before the vote
began.

So with that vote chucked in the bin, the whole .front resolution fails
to pass. I'm sure Philipp will
take issue with the fact that I included a vote cast shortly after the
stated end of the ballot in the tally,
but to the credit of that person, his vote was an intelligible response
and at this stage, the ultimate and
final result of the vote remains unchanged. After months of ramblings
about unbreakable Malbolge encrypted
domain names, talk of establishing top level domains for trademarked
video game brands, and a completely
stalled effort towards establishing or at least adopting a Certificate
Authority, I had imagined that the
.front proposal backed by members of the already proven team
administrating the .chan top level domain would
be a breath of fresh air.

I was wrong.

I don't know what I'll do from here. But I do know that I no longer have
the enthusiasm I did for this project
or the hope that I will be able to accomplish anything meaningful as a
member of it. I feel like I've wasted my
time and effort contributing to it, and that I've wasted the time of
others in encouraging others to do the same.
It was a considerable endeavor undertaken by verax and Pathore to write
and deploy an entirely new registration system
capable of supporting registration across multiple TLDs including .chan,
and as of present, I do not feel confident that
their time was well spent.

That's it.


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Rouben

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Matthias Merkel
CTO
BoltN Hosting Limited
https://boltn-hosting.com
Company registration number 11081979

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