>4. Don't offer large salaries to anyone. The role shouldn't attract people who care about salaries, even if it means you don't attract the "best talent". That "best talent" was probably going to wreck the organisation anyway.

Is this necessarily the right move? I have a vague recollection of reading about Singapore and their approach to attaining top talent to the public sector with high wages. I could be totally wrong!

Yeah, I'd argue for the opposite (and often do, in relation to increasing politician's pay).

You want people who don't need to play the game and buddy up to people if they want to improve their lot. You don't want people who see the role as a stepping stone to "better things".

Indeed, entering into a political space is a very expensive gamble and requires significant investment before one could obtain a return that is commensurate. If politicians do not have a way to obtain a return for their risk that puts them in the public's trust, then the profession will be filled with those who take the risk because they seek private reward.

Politicians are easy—reward them with a generous pension rather than a generous salary. Bonus points if part of that pension can be inversely tied to future private income.

I think it's the right move. It worked really well in academia in its hay days (1950-1990):

1. High bar to get a job.

2. Modest, but livable salary.

3. Long-term job stability.

This guarantees you don't really need to worry about money (unless you're super-greedy), but at the same time, no one was in it for the money. It broke when elite university compensation went astronomical ($1 million plus at the top-end), and job stability went away (no reasonable paths to tenure, and lots of adjunct / postdoc / research scientists / etc. positions).

With competition, the easiest way to land a tenured job is to lie and cheat. With high compensation, there are all the wrong reasons to do it. As a result, several elite schools are now cesspools of corruptions, academic misconduct, and (most legal but unethical) embezzlement.

We should go back to where:

* Jobs are stable

* Salaries are modest, but cover food+housing+basic essentials

* Benefits are strong

I'd say something similar is true for other not-for-profits. There are tons of exceptionally smart, competent, caring people who want jobs which provide meaning and have a positive impact on the world. To take them, they want to be able to feed their families. To stay there, you don't need to guarantee high income, so much as high stability.

There needs to be a difference between the stewardship roles and the doer/self-interests roles. You can pay the doer, but the stewards are ideally volunteers who care about the mission.

That this decision was made in the first place, and that ICANN took so long to withhold consent, shows that there are not enough stewards in either organization.

The problem was that oversight roles where hamstrung deliberately by the executive (doers)

Holding meetings in far flung and hard to get to places was one tactic

The actual problem is that the oversight roles didn’t immediately dismiss the executive when they pulled these tricks.

Your not wrong you need a strong chair and a commitment to good governance - I suspect there where a lot of buggins turn appointees with no experience in holding an executive to account.

Exactly right.

Singapore has ways to force people to be socially responsible.

A few suggestions:

- Define the long-term goals of an organisation explicitly.

- Interpret these narrowly.

- Give stakeholders a vote, both in the election of officials and on certain topics.

I would argue that there exist (hundreds of) thousands of usually small, non-profit organisations that are run pretty efficiently. I think of pretty much all of the social and sport clubs for adults and kids I know of. A lot of interpersonal drama, but also countless of volunteers and people just working for their local community organised by their hobbies. So there's something about scale and dissociation with the original goals going on.

I would have thought all of those points would apply to ICANN. The issue isn't having clearly defined goals, the issue is that for some value of N, the Nth administration of an organisation eventually behave like exploiters rather than stewards. They don't care about your silly words.

I’m curious if a law as code approach code help? Define bylaws publicly with a good specification. Decisions could be validated against the specifications. The checker’s consequences could be setup to be immediate and binding as the system matures.

So what factors influence N? Because I point out (perhaps trivial, but a lot of our social life is organised that way) organisations where N-->Inf.

> 4. Don't offer large salaries to anyone. The role shouldn't attract people who care about salaries, even if it means you don't attract the "best talent". That "best talent" was probably going to wreck the organisation anyway.

This seems counterproductive to me. If you don't pay people enough that they're worried about losing the position then they're incentivized to try and monetize whatever power they have, leading to corruption.

>> 4. Don't offer large salaries to anyone. The role shouldn't attract people who care about salaries, even if it means you don't attract the "best talent". That "best talent" was probably going to wreck the organisation anyway.

> This seems counterproductive to me. If you don't pay people enough that they're worried about losing the position then they're incentivized to try and monetize whatever power they have, leading to corruption.

No, I think the idea is to offer something comfortable but not so large salary would attract people by itslef. You want to discourage the people who "try and monetize whatever power they have" from joining, and reduce the barriers to joining for people who aren't driven by greed.

And if you offer too much, people are incentivized to get the job for money, rather than because they want to do good.

Aligning incentives with goals is wise, but it's hard to do perfectly. Humans are still human.

There are a lot of jobs with high salaries out there, and most jobs have sufficient barrier to entry that you have to come to the table with something beyond "I'd like some money please".

I don't know, it just doesn't feel like there's a ton of risk of "non-profit board member" becoming the next gold-rush degree track.

it is the classical principal-agent dilemma that we face in society since the point in time we started delegating individual tasks to individuals, for any individual will carry the seeds of greed and egoism in it in varying degrees. thus there will always be a conflict of interest for evolutionary reasons.

over the millenia we've developed mechanisms like the division of power (checks & balances) for governments and the board system for corporations.

what I want to say with this is that if organizational stewardship is not working, it's most likely a flaw in the structure of the system (and/or the processes), and my instinct would tell me to investigate if the right amount & scrutiny in terms of checks & balances is in place.

I think your reversing causality here, expecting that check and balances will provide the guidance for people not to behave selfish. People will always find a way to rig the system in their favor and more or other rules in the division of power is going to result eventually in the same outcome.

I think we should investigate the scope of power instead of your proposed scale of power.

That’s “Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy”:

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”