Bill, This is going to be my last message on the subject. Although interesting, I think that we should continue in Seoul, where in a F2F situation we will reduce the risk for further miscommunication and misunderstandings. A few clarifications:
"But the main point for the SIC to maintain the concept of constituency, against the open opposition of NCUC," which sounded to me like you were saying the main point for the SIC is to maintain the concept of constituency, against the open opposition of NCUC. Sorry for my confusion.
The confusion arises, IMHO, from the fact that we use the word "Constituency" to mean different things. I mean "the body that, as is right now, has ïnter alia the right to have councillors in the GNSO Council". And, unless mistaken, the concept of constituency as described is not what NCUC wants. And I do believe that the NCUC has stated this openly. When you say that NCUC is in favour of "constituencies", you mean "the bodies that are defined in the NCUC charter as being constituencies", which, unless I am mistaken, have many rights but not the right of voting councillors. So, one way to progress is to say that that everybody is in favour of "Constituencies", but that we need to come to an agreement to what will be the exact "powers" of the constituencies.
[...] (BTW, why did SIC ok RySG eliminating constituencies in their charter? I never understood the rationale for not having harmonized structures across SGs, and it makes the misimpression about NCUC's charter which explicitly provides for constituencies seem all the more odd.)
I think I have explained this a zillion times, but I can say this for the zillionth+1 time. One of the roles of the constituencies in the initial design of ICANN was to provide a mechanism to define and register membership. This was addressing a concern, which was to avoid capture by a group of people who were joining the process in a category where they were not really qualified to be. During the discussions related to the review, in the consultations with Ry and Rar we realized that this risk was non-existent for them, because in the way we had defined the SGs (i.e. as being the "Contracted Parties") we had an automatic mechanism to sort out the issue: if the organization has a contract with ICANN, it is in, otherwise it is out. And by virtue of this, we also had a complete list of the membership. This happened because during the process there was rough consensus by the community (although I was personally against, having preferred a "Suppliers" vs. "Consumers" approach) to have the "Contracted" vs. "Non-Contracted" separation. In the case of the non-contracted parties, we do not have such a mechanism. Check, for instance, the discussion about the potential individual registrants constituency, where one of the debates is how to sort out who is a commercial and who is a non-commercial registrant, and how can we monitor that the status at the moment of the registration is kept over time. Same issue if we think about a business entity that is also an IP holder, how we determine who is an internet service provider and who is not, etc. In simple words, we do not have an easy mechanism to determine who is qualified and who is not to join a SG. However, we have that for the constituencies, in the way that constituencies are currently defined and chartered. So, the proposal of the SIC (and the decision by the Board) has been that we could get rid of the constituencies in the contractual house, but not in the non-contractual house. You may agree or disagree with the decision, that has been already taken by the Board and is not on the table for further discussion, but this is the explanation of the rationale for it.
Entirely separate from the principal of constituencies are two issues:
[...]
You make good points here. I am looking forward to discuss these, among other things, in Seoul. I would like to keep this email short, addressing just clarifications and potential misunderstandings.
I didn't characterize the SIC as bad and ugly. It is unquestionably true though that the SIC imposed a solution that was opposed by NCUC's 80 organizational and 87 individual members and a wide array of non- member supporters and was supported by 3 people. If you don't like calling this top down, ok, give me another term for something done by the board over the strenuous opposition of the community in question. I'm not hung up on language, just facts.
Quite interestingly, I just read the email from Dominik Filipp, who agrees with you that the SIC did not follow a bottom-up process. However, what he objects on, is exactly the opposite: for him constituencies should be not only created and approved, but should have voting power in the council. The fact is that the bottom-up process is usually defined as "taking the decision that suits me" ;>) On a more serious vein, I invite everybody to take a step back and a deep breath. We started this process years ago, with a council where the voting ratio between non-commercial and commercial users was 1:3. The BGC before, and the SIC[K] after the changes in the Board committee structure, have analysed proposals, discussed with the community (all parts of the community), gathered feedback, proposed a solution, presented the solution to the different parts, rediscussed over and over again with all those who were opposing it from different sides, repeated these iterations several times, and arrived now at the final step where hopefully in a couple of weeks we will have this historic change, and a GNSO Council where the commercial and non-commercial communities are represented on a base of parity. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to go through an interim phase, during which we had transitional charters, giving ourselves time to think thoroughly the new composition and functioning of the SGs, but in a situation in which we were progressing from the past, and established as a matter of principle the parity between commercial and non-commercial. I was prepared to hear the grumbling of the commercial users, noting that they will be less represented than before, but I was incredibly astonished by the fact that all what I am hearing is the bitching of the different components of the non-commercial community, fighting bitterly for the control of the additional seats, yelling and screaming at the SIC from different sides, apparently forgetting completely that it was the BGC and SIC who recommended in first place to have this new balance. To be honest, if I had the chance to rewind the clock, over my dead body I would have ever accepted the task to deal with this matter, and would have much preferred to leave things as they were, raising my arms to show powerlessness, and suggesting to have everybody getting together and achieve consensus in a real "bottom-up way", and to come back to the Board when a consensus was found. Anybody has a guess on where we would be now? My bet is that we would still be with the old GNSO structure, as who likes the status quo would have prevented any move. The bottom-up process is not a process by which the decision is taken by the bottom, but a process in which the Board consults the community to the maximum extent possible, takes idea and proposals from the community to the maximum extent possible, but then makes a decision that does not necessarily please everybody.
Unfortunately, the consultation, negotiation and compromise didn't really involve NCUC.
What?!? In Sydney alone the SIC had two official meetings with NCUC, plus the discussions in the corridors, plus emails before and after. And even outside the SIC, other Board members were involved. I know that neither you nor Milton were there, but other NCUC folks, including the Chair, were there, you can check with them.
But we can still do that, and very much look forward to working with you in Seoul and beyond to arrive at a lasting solution that is supported by the actually existing NC community.
I hope so. Cheers, Roberto