You have to wonder how this goes together: The same board and staff who believe that public elections (with significant outreach organized independently of any individual candidates) are not suitable to select the members of the board, are partially relying, in their decision on .org, on a self-selected survey of the worst kind, namely, on the public support for bidders: As far as that part of the evaluation is concerned, my earlier remark that the NCDNHC's report looks sound was rather premature.

There was no proper outreach of any kind - it is most likely safe to assume that the support has been orchestrated by bidders; in ISOC's case, that's a certainty. The evaluation of that survey is, at least as far as ISOC is concerned, based on a pure guess by one of the evaluation teams - see page 23 of the NCDNHC's report. To make things worse, the "score-based" evaluation of results in the NCDNHC's report relies on an arbitrary transformation of "support" scores documented on page 45 of the report.

More precisely, on page 22 of the report, a first scoring mechanism for public support is suggested (and actually used for the "average ranking" evaluation on page 26). The "normalized ranking" on page 27, however, which - in the overall ranking - moves ISOC from the third place to a somewhat better second place, and moves the IMS/ISC proposal into the "B" group, is based on the arbitrary transformation mentioned above.

What is this supposed to be? An exercise in "lying with statistics"?

Note: I don't have any objection at all against Afilias and ISOC taking over .org - in fact, I'd certainly prefer them over a considerable number of the other bidders. ICANN staff's conclusion that the ISOC proposal is the strongest and most balanced proposal overall may quite certainly be correct.

But the low quality of some of the underlying evaluation is outrageous - in particular when there's considerable rumor about an inside deal anyway.