There is a Facebook discussion currently going on, and to my mind, this comment pretty much summed up one key part of the problem with how ICANN currently operates.
It was from someone called Kerry Brown:
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I attended the London ICANN where during the meeting I actually felt like something was accomplished at the ALAC summit. Within weeks I was totally disillusioned when I realized that the board was paying lip service to the results of the summit and that nothing would change. I wonder how many board members actually read the recommendations? I had previously attended a half dozen ICANN meetings basically as an observer. I was excited to attend as a participant. Now I am unsubscribed from all the ICANN mailing lists. I doubt I will ever go to another meeting.
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It's not just the Board that is guilty of failing to foster a real sense of community but clearly in this case it was.
As most of you know, I spent three years as ICANN's general manager of public participation and I saw a big part of my job as building sustainable systems that would bring in more people, and make it easy and worthwhile for them to participate.
It was extremely difficult and I spent more than half my time dealing with efforts by those inside ICANN to undermine any effective changes, largely because it meant a reduction in their personal influence.
One fact that I continually used back then as a way to try to shake people into thinking reasonably came from a series of surveys, interviews, questionnaires and data analyses of people actually attending ICANN meetings.
I wanted to know: who are these people? Is this their first time? And if so how do we get them to stay engaged and come back?
The results were very clear: one third of ICANN attendees were regulars, coming to nearly every meeting; one third were occasional attendees, often because they were obliged to go to one ICANN meeting every year or two years, sometimes because they were intrigued and wanted to see what one was like.
And one third - every single meeting - was people who were attending for the first time. And at the next meeting, one third were attending for the first time. And the next. And the next. The percentage never got smaller. So I started trying to track down these people that arrived and then disappeared never to be heard from again.
Of that one third, roughly a half came from the country ICANN was in. They came because it was relatively local. Of them, almost none ever returned - either physically and online. They simply took a look, didn't like what they saw and never came back.
The other half of first-time attendees came from all over the world and went to a lot of trouble to get to the meeting. Of them, around four-fifths never came back. I tracked people down and asked them why.
They were mostly vague but in the whole, it was the sense that they were not made welcome. That the sessions were long and boring. That no one gave their opinions any weight. That everything was controlled by those ICANNites who attended every meeting. And that no one ever sought to engage them; they were irrelevant to the people that mattered.
When I relayed this information (which I did repeatedly) to those in the position to actually do something about it, not once did anyone say "oh no, that's terrible, what can we do to fix it?".
Instead, the responses varied from: "well, they're clearly not cut out to join ICANN if they give up so easily", to "but we have lots of opportunities for them to engage" to "I don't recognize that at all; I see lots of new people engaging".
In other words, an absolute refusal to accept it as a problem that needed to be addressed.
I think it is extremely rich to complain that ICANN is not sufficiently broad or representative enough. All of you on this list are responsible for that lack of engagement. And if you were serious about actually involving and engaging more people, it would take but one day to come up with a long list of things that could be done to improve the current situation.
Until that happens; until you get serious about empowering non-insiders; until real money and real resources are applied to that effort; then I don't think any of you get to talk about what real representation means.
Kieren