[arin-discuss] ARIN Consultation: Changing the Voter Eligibility for ARIN Member Organizations

[Dennis Fazio]

In my experience, 10%-15% turnout doesn't seem that bad in these types of online elections with these type of organizations. You do have 400-500 engaged organizations making policy decisions by participating, which is a pretty sizable number. It wasn't too long ago when only small handfuls of people were doing this for the thousands of Internet participants at the time.

There is a division of role with DMR and admin/tech POCs. The POCs are operational roles, the DMR is the business/policy representative to ARIN. The POCs keep the services up to date and running; the DMR deals with the governance and policy issues.

In most smaller organizations, the DMR and POC are likely the same person, so extending voting ability to POCs will not likely increase the voting pool that much. Making it easier to change the DMR would be helpful. Otherwise, I'll bet that the DMR often gives a trusted POC their login credentials to delegate voting in smaller organizations.

I suspect that most organizations treat ARIN as a utility service and are not engaged enough to read through all the policy and election material. As long as the service keeps working OK, they're fine. Most of the elections are non-controversial and if we who do not know the candidates or have not heard of them, we have a hard time making choices based only on blurbs in the distributed material. An abstention vote might be nice, but that may not help much either. Abstention by not voting is easier than going through and marking a ballot.

If there were a truly important and contested Internet governance issue and it was in the news, and folks were either seriously concerned or dissatisfied, you can be sure there will be a huge surge in DMR voting participation.

In the meantime, keep it simple, keep the roles defined as they are, and don't worry about the participation level.
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Dennis Fazio
TIES, Director of Technical Services

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