t byfield on 22 Sep 2000 23:23:01 -0000 |
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<nettime> ICANN outsources MAL election |
<www.tbtf.com/roving_reporter/> Fri Sep 22 13:25:42 EDT 2000 ICANN forgets to announce that it outsourced the MAL election On the morning of Thursday 21 September, election.com, sort of announced[1] that ICANN chose the company to "conduct ICANN's first worldwide online vote" -- the Membership At Large election, scheduled to take place 1-10 October. Curiously, a day and a half later ICANN still hasn't gotten around to announcing anything of the sort. Is this an oversight? Yet another instance of a staff straining under the burdens of B2B "technical oversight"? We shall see: if ICANN makes a Friday-afternoon announcement, savvy observers may well wonder why ICANN would want to play down such a historic development by inserting it into the media cycle just as it troughs for the weekend. Among the "long list of satisfied customers" election.com cites in its non-press non-release is the Arizona Democratic Party. However, that arrangement didn't meet with uniform glee: the Voting Integrity Project[3] filed suit over the contract, driven by a concerns that the reckless dotcomification of elections brought up grave questions about equality of access in the context of a public election. See this short summary of events and links in the RISKS Digest.) The VIP's specific concerns don't seem to apply to the MAL election, because the MAL electorate, almost by definition, consists of people with internet access. [1] <http://www.election.com/us/pressroom/pr2000/0921.htm> [2] <http://www.icann.org/> [3] <http://www.voting-integrity.org/> [4] <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.83.html#subj6> [5] <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net