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A proposal put for vote to all WDDM members
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: June 19, 2006 12:23PM

Dear WDDM members!
A group of five "Active" WDDM members have been having discussion in the WDDM Forum about how to move closer to the re-establishment of a functioning WDDM. You can find these discussions here in this "Internal WDDM Discussions Folder", in this "WDDM Membership Guidelines" forum. We have come up with a proposal for the "WDDM Membership Structure and Rules", and we want to put this proposal to the vote of all the current WDDM members before we proceed further.
We recommend that you read all the discussions in this "WDDM Membership Guidelines" forum, and possibly in other related forums in the "Internal WDDM Discussions Folder" so that you can make an informed decision.
The proposal is attached below as a quote (white box).
The vote on this proposal is a simple YES/NO vote.
You can either ACCEPT (YES vote) or REJECT (NO vote) this proposal.
The decision on this proposal will be made on the basis of the majority of all who have voted within 7 calendar days from now, i.e., by June 26, 15:00 MST (or 17:00 EST, or 21:00 GMT/UTC, or June 27, 6:00 Tokyo time).
To make it easy for all the WDDM members, the vote on this proposal is by e-mail, send you votes in to wddm@world-wide-democracy.net.
Thank you,
Mirek


THE PROPOSAL that is the subject of this vote   wrote:


WDDM Membership Structure and Rules


Summary:


Our past experience shows that there are roughly two groups who want to be associated with WDDM.


1. There is a larger group of people who support WDDM goals (to various extent) but are currently not able to participate more actively. These persons will be called the WDDM Associate Members. They constitute a loose Association without any further internal structure. WDDM Associate Membership is granted without approval to all interested persons who complete the registration form at [www.world-wide-democracy.net]. However, their membership can be terminated, if their behaviour is in complete contradiction to the WDDM mission.


2. The second, smaller group consists of people who are able and willing to be active in the WDDM operations. They will be called the Administrators (or Operating Members, Active Members, or Ordinary Members - the exact name chosen may be the subject of further discussion). They can create whatever structure (officers, Board) they deem necessary for the efficient functioning of WDDM. This group of Administrators can be seen as the WDDM proper - an Organization within the larger pool (or association) of associate members. Any Associate Member can apply to become an Administrator. Such applications are processed and approved by all current Administrators.



PROPOSED RULES:


RULE A: Only the current Administrators shall hold authority to create or amend the WDDM Operating Rules or Constitution.


RULE B: All members can make suggestions relating to WDDM's operations, but final decisions shall be made only by a consensus of the organization's Administrators.


RULE C: Any Administrator, who fails to vote at official WDDM polls (for more than five (5) times or more) during a period of more than six (6) months without an acceptable reason submitted to the Operating Members shall be relegated to Associate Member status.


RULE D: Any Administrator member shall be relegated to Associate Member status should 75 percent of the Administrators vote in favour of such a motion.



To become a WDDM (Associate) MEMBER: an individual must complete the application form found at www.world-wide-democracy.net.



To become an ADMINISTRATOR: a member shall have actively participated in WDDM discussions for no less than six (6) months and must complete the application form found at www.world-wide-democracy.net.



Attachments to the Proposal:   wrote:


A. A transitional measure: All the current members can become the Administrators immediately if they wish so.


B. The Administrator application form will contain the fields for the applicant's full real name and mailing address, and the following information on the approval process:
1. The Administrator Member Application is sent to all the current Administrator Members for review.
2. The Administrator Application Review will be completed within 90 days.
3. An applicant will be immediately accepted as a WDDM Administrator if not more than 20% of the current Administrators have any objections to her/his Membership.
4. An applicant will be immediately rejected if 80% or more of the Administrators are against her/his Administrator Membership.
5. If none of 3. or 4. applies, the application is suspended until a consensus (either 3. or 4.) is achieved.


We are looking for your votes!


The initial Active Members/Administrators

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/2006 05:17PM by MiKolar.


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No on WDDM structural proposal - plus suggestions
Posted by: mantell (IP Logged)
Date: June 23, 2006 05:04AM

Hi Mirek,


Thanks for helping out with posting privileges for me.


The WDDM structure proposal is a turkey (big, noisy, doesn’t fly). It just isn’t very democratic. It rolls all decision making into an administratorship.


Here are the lessons I take from this episode:


DELIBERATION: Direct democracy activists have to do better on deliberation. This proposal needed more thorough discussion. Probably all proposals should be posted on the bulletin board for a specified period of deliberation (discussion and modification) before going to vote. Also, others may have had the same problem I did in posting their comments.


MEANS AND ENDS: WDDM should practice direct democracy. Shouldn’t it? Whatever structure is agreed upon, WDDM decision making should heavily rely on initiative, referendum and recall. All decisions of the leadership, including non-action, should be subject to a rapid, democratic, binding review by the entire membership. And a very low threshold of members should be empowered to bring a topic to the leadership, or directly to the entire membership, for review and then binding vote.


Mark Antell, editor
www.citizenpowermagazine.net


Postscript: One more suggestion


SHARED PURPOSE: Maybe this doesn’t have much to do with the proposal under consideration, but I think it just might help. I recommend a basic membership pledge. Something stating that members of WDDM work towards direct democracy because they think it would improve governance all round the world. I’d also like something stating a commitment to use the most democratic means possible. I recognize that any shared purpose agreement would need to pass by a very large majority.


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RESULTS of the vote
Posted by: WebMaster (IP Logged)
Date: June 26, 2006 05:08PM

All WDDM members got all the responses, so you know the results are:


Updated July 18 after processing with delay e-mails with the explanation from two members about their votes - there was actually one more Yes vote, and an abstention confirmed:


2nd update: July 28 - another late Yes vote from G. Kokkas came:


16 (out of the currently registered 40) members reacted:


Breakdown of the vote:


YES: 6 votes
NO: 6 votes
ABSTAINED: 4 votes (explicitly 2, implicitly 2)


(Original post with the count of June 26 was:
Yes: 4 votes
No: 6 votes
Abstained: 3 votes
Unclear: 1 vote)


Therefore the proposal was rejected.
What does it mean???


Positive development: 2 or 3 additional members are interested in the process of creating a meaningful WDDM


Webmaster/moderator

webmaster



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2006 07:23PM by WddmAdmin.


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Re: No on WDDM structural proposal - plus suggestions
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: June 26, 2006 05:15PM

Mark,
Thanks for the suggestions.
This is all we had in mind - definitely I had in mind, as I tried to explain in my vote e-mail (and it might be beneficial, if I copy it also here).
Most of the materials that is the WDDM site, definitely the main page, is just preliminary work of one or two persons. It is all open for discussion, and waits to be replaced by the final documents approved by a large number of participants.
Mirek

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]


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Re: Yes on WDDM structural proposal
Posted by: MiKolar (IP Logged)
Date: June 26, 2006 05:19PM

As I promised, here is my vote explanation:


Dear WDDM members!
This is about my YES vote. But I start with a few comments on the already received replies.
I would be glad to receive the accusations of being incompetent and guilty of bad formulations, but I strongly reject any suspicions of being antidemocratic, oligarchical, dictatorial, etc. Where are e.g. any elements of representative democracy in the proposal? Can you show them to me?
I suspect that all these suspicions/accusations were the result of not reading at least the whole discussion in the "WDDM Membership Guidelines" forum. (But I agree, especially after I saw the most recent additions in this Forum added during the past week since the proposal was put to vote, that reading the whole discussion requires a lot of concentration and effort to get the whole picture, and it shows that we have to start from scratch, and the first thing to do it to devise procedures for orderly deliberation that is easy to follow, that would not wast a lot of time trying to understand what's going on.)
But it was actually sufficient to read and try to understand the introduction to the Proposal ("Our past experience shows that there are roughly two groups who want to be associated with WDDM ...".


Let me remind you that there is actually no real WDDM existing yet. That the notion of "WDDM member" has little meaning. We have not been able to arrive at any collective position yet. Mission, etc. posted on the WDDM site is just a place-holder, waiting to be replaced by something we can all agree on.
It started with an interesting idea in 2000 in Greece (at the birthplace of "democracy", so this can have a powerful symbolic meaning, which it would pity to abandon lightly, and so we still continue the attempts to keep this idea alive under the original name WDDM). But that effort has never been brought to anything meaningful yet.
Then something more than a year ago, this still continuing attempt to revive WDDM started with the call to "Online Constituting Convention": [www.world-wide-democracy.net]
Of this still nothing has come up yet. (It looks like we want to provide a strong argument to those who are claiming that DD will never work: if our group of people who consider themselves international DD advocates cannot arrive at a single collective position in the whole six year and even at a reasonable procedure of how to conduct the collective deliberation, isn't that a pretty strong argument for them?)


We have never heard from some of the original 2000 founding members (for the recently registered members: their list and a lot of other WDDM history is in the WDDM site archive). And we have many new members who signed up since March 2005, from whom we have never heard a single word after they signed up.
So we have two "problems" to solve before we can start to create anything meaningful:
First is a "legal" one. Can we use the name WDDM (World Wide Direct Democracy Movement) with the above mentioned certain symbolic power, or are only the original 2000 founding "members" still owning this title? The
Second: when we would want to arrive at a collective position on something, how are we supposed to count the quorum if we have never heard from a significant percentage of our current "members"?


We do not want to throw out anybody, so the essence of the proposal was to try to accommodate everybody with various degrees of the willingness to be actively involved. For the start we defined two groups (G. Kokkas suggested even five groups with different degree of involvement, with which they have a good experience in their DD movement in Greece). One group would be all the sympathizers (or WDDM fan club if you want), and the other those who want to be more active and participate in creating a meaningful WDDM - for this second group there were many suggestions in the course of our discussion how to call their members and I dutifully listed all these suggestions in the final proposal with the proviso that the name actually used is subject to final discussion. This second group would constitute the actual (proper, only) WDDM organization. There was nothing in the proposal about any internal structure of this group, any suggestion of a hierarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship. All the members (the only actual members of WDDM) of this group would be absolutely equal, and would use yet to be devised procedures to make collective decisions.


Best thing would be to simply call the members of this second group just "members" and those in the first group simply sympathizers (fans).
The reason why we ended up with the resulting complicating terminology was "problem 1" mentioned above, to appease the 2000 founding members, most of them are not active at all at present, and so they would be called just "WDDM fans".
So instead of mere "fans" we devised the terms "associate members", and then we had to use for the actual real members some other name, and none of those we came up seems very suitable.
And that was probably the only mistake we made.


Then there were some concerns about spammers, and "sleeping cells", who would be able to take over WDDM if any "sympathizers" would be able to become a real member without any further screening, so we put in the 3 or 6 month waiting period, and the process of accepting new (real) members by all the current members (again absolutely democratically). But this would be possible to change any time the majority of members would want to - as all the current "members" would be able to become real members immediately, and participate in creating the final rules, and these are still to be created.


So I still have to vote "YES" for the essence of this proposal.


Remember, there is no WDDM established yet, currently registered WDDM "members" (users of the WDDM site) are merely people who showed some interest in the idea of WDDM, and it is only up to them (that is up to you) to create something that can have real impact. You were all invited repeatedly to become more active and become involved in the discussions. This proposal was the last attempt to broaden the number of the people involved.


Mirek

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/2006 05:20PM by MiKolar.


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What does the vote mean?
Posted by: EricLim (IP Logged)
Date: June 27, 2006 06:28PM

It means that the majority of those who have voted rejected the idea that WDDM be governed by a small group of members. However, this is not the purpose of the vote. It was not about the election of WDDM Officers called "Administrators" or any other management staff. We were trying to organize "WDDM proper" with "active" members who would participate in discussions and voting as full members of a DD organization are expected to do. This is why the proposal is called "WDDM Membership Structure and Rules" and not "the Election of WDDM Officers".


Many were confused by the use of the word "Administrators" for the "active" members and had rightly voted against the proposal which appeared to have conferred the powers of the Ordinary Members on the proposed "Administrators".


Furthermore, the wordings of the proposal also make it onerous to be "active" members and to remain to be so, discouraging many from joining the "active" group. This is contrary to the intention to have as many "active" members as possible.


The good thing that has come out of this vote is that, at least 14 members have responded to the vote and have shown their interest and concern for the future of WDDM. They, therefore, deserve to be the first Ordinary Members of WDDM.


In view of the above, I propose we have another YES/NO vote on similar terms as the previous one on this proposal (Proposal 02/2006):


1 That all the 14 members who have voted on the Proposal dated 19 June 2006 and any other who vote on Proposal 02/2006 be Ordinary Members;


2 That all the other current members who wish to be Ordinary Members make their wish known to the WDDM Webmaster at wbm@world-wide-democracy.net within the next 14 calendar days. Those who do not do so shall by default be Associate Members, but they are still eligible to be Ordinary Members any time they wish.


3 That the meanings of Ordinary and Associate Members be the same as proposed in Membership Rules Summary No. 2; and


4 That the Membership Rules Summary No. 2 [www.world-wide-democracy.net] be adopted.


In this case, the voting shall end by 5 July 2006.


After the vote is done and if Proposal 02/2006 is adopted, those who feel that Membership Rules Summary No. 2 needs amendments could submit their proposals for the Ordinary Members' consideration at the Forum and then for adoption, if they are supported.


As this is a gaint step forward for WDDM to be an effective DD organization, I urge all members to give Proposal 02/2006 their careful consideration and vote on it.


Best Regards
Eric Lim


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