[arin-ppml] Should we regularly poll the PPML about all draft policies?

[William Herrin]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Scott Leibrand <scottleibrand at gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing we could do is poll the PPML on all draft policies, in advance
> of each public policy meeting.  Is that the kind of thing you're
> thinking would be a good idea?  Does anyone else have an opinion on this?

Scott,

I think that's a good idea, but there's risk.

First, I think the formal questions should be limited to: Do you
support, oppose or take no position on proposal X as written.

If you ask more specific questions, you'll bias the results with the
choice of questions. That bias is okay in a forum like this one where
folks can give a free-form answer, drive the discussion off towards
their own biases and pose their own questions. It'll foul the
statistical validity when the answers are pre-selected.

Second, you have the uneducated voter problem. The folks who've
offered opinions on the list have done so after becoming at least
somewhat familiar with the issues surrounding the proposal, not just
the text of the proposal itself. Some of the lurkers, perhaps many,
won't have done so.

I don't know the answer to that one... Maybe you also ask, "Have you
followed the discussion about this proposal: closely, somewhat, not at
all." Maybe you sort the answers into two lists: responses from those
who have posted to PPML in the past 6 months and responses from those
who have not.

Then too, there's gaming the system. It isn't particularly hard to
sign up 100 gmail accounts for PPML if someone expects you to issue a
poll. I don't know how you deal with that except to use the results
indirectly, as a tool to check the consensus you think you see on PPML
as opposed to a direct tool to measure the consensus.


Regards,
Bill Herrin


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William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
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