auDA Caves In And Releases Secret Ballot Numbers

Over the past few days I’ve been receiving a lot of phone calls and email messages from auDA members who are angry and frustrated with what happened at the 2010 AGM.

I’d like to set the record straight.

I attend the auDA AGM as a demand class member, but more importantly, representing the interests of small business and professional domain name investors. As a small business owner myself, its something I feel very strongly about.

After the votes were cast into a box, a number of people went off to another room to count them. There was no truly independent 3rd party to review this process. There was no independent scrutineers – we were just told of the result.

Having spoken to many small business owners and domain investors I had a good idea of how many votes I had. What has shocked me, and has shocked the entire industry is that auDA refused to disclose the voting numbers because they claim it was a “secret ballot”.

Later that afternoon I posted the results on this very blog. What I didn’t know was that the auDA board was meeting behind closed doors and discussing this issue.

What has since transpired is that auDA has emailed its members and disclosed the numbers. This has never happened before and I’m told that it’s a direct result of my candidacy.

Here are the numbers:

Richard Bone – 2 votes
Kevin Fleming – 2 votes
Kim Heitman – 34 votes
Simon Johnson – 21 votes
Erhan Karabardak – 23 votes
Cheryl Langdon-Orr – 32 votes
Kelvin Markham – 2 votes

What is not clear is if these numbers include any votes that auDA may have deemed “invalid”. For example, people filling in the form incorrectly. Votes are sent in via fax to Maddocks (auDA’s lawyers). Who knows if your vote was counted or not!

At the end of the day, this is a huge win for our campaign for transparency. In the 10 years auDA has been going, its never disclosed this information… until now.

Chris Disspain on Monetization – Live from Traffic DownUnder 2008

Chris started off by correcting some statements made by previous speakers (ouch). He didn’t have any slides prepared and thanked a number of people, including an individual that persuaded him to come to the conference as he wasn’t going to attend. In my view it was probably not the best start to a presentation to an audience of 200+ domainers. However, he did clarify a list of common misconceptions about domainers and auDA. Apparently auDA like domainers! I think I need a cuddle.

Following on, there were a number of interesting statements made under the banner of “we don’t like”. For example:

• shoes.com.au – we expect a shoe site.
• we don’t like mis-spellings

Registrars as a monetizer – not comfortable with that. “You should make a choice between being a registrar and a domainer is not acceptable in our world.”

auDA is thinking about publishing a list of drop names. One to keep an eye on.