Hello Dev,

As much as I think what you've said is interesting, I doubt it's what AtLarge require as an improvement. A few question/comments comes to mind as I read through your proposal:

1. What is wrong with the current ALS structure that the "ISOC chapter like" setup as a replacement would address? If this is with regards to individual membership, isn't some RALOs already doing that? What can we learn from their experience and how can we improve on it sounds like a way forward to me.

2. I don't know about many ISOC chapters but based on the few I am familiar with, I doubt ISOC chapter is as successful as such, especially in the area of sourcing diverse input into a global process. Don't get me wrong, I am an ISOC member and this is not to play down on the ORG but to recognise that even as they strive to improve there will always be participation challenge which isn't anyone's fault (when it gets to certain level)

3. I can assure you that the level of success that ISOC chapters may have achieved is among many things also because of the support/resources/funding that ISOC global provided to her chapters. Is ICANN ORG and community willing and ready for such commitment. Should we go into this and get blamed later?

4. Currently the only significant things we do for ALSes is an opportunity to have one global meeting at every ATLAS event and in if some RALOs are lucky they get to bring their ALS reps to one ICANN event in their region. Based on this, we already have significant noise that ICANN already spend too much on AtLarge, you can't imagine what we will get if it were chapters because maintaining a chapter isn't cheap (especially if it's to effective)

5. It's easier to sell ISOC chapter to a country/Netizen than to sell an AtLarge chapter, so I see a significant marketing challenge there.

6. ISOC chapters isn't just a virtual setup and getting an ISOC chapter up and running indeed requires legal documentation locally. If we think it will be easy to get someone interested in not just leading a team but going through that process then we should go interview some countries/localities who are still trying to get their ISOC chapter up and running (bear in mind that ISOC is more marketable).

7. The current ALS is somewhat based on freewill hence ICANN/AtLarge has no serious obligation to ensure the ALS remain alive as the organisation runs independently. However once we put AtLarge on that path of chapters, we would have signed up for more upbringing responsibilities which would result to more administrative responsibilities (was ITEMS mentioning there is too much internal processes in current structure, wait for what is to come if we go chapter route).

Overall maybe it may have been good to have a chapter like AtLarge in the early 2000 before the community reduced AtLarge to a single Board Member organisation and with advisory capacity, I doubt such is realistic in the present ICANN not because it will not receive support of the community but because it doesn't sound sustainable!

Regards

Sent from my LG G4
Kindly excuse brevity and typos

On Feb 13, 2017 15:05, "Dev Anand Teelucksingh" <devtee@gmail.com> wrote:

Here's an idea for an alternative proposal for At-Large to the EMM model proposed in the At-Large Review

My thoughts - The proposed EMM has flaws. Some immediate ones :

- it destroys the community and with that, the consensus building of community with replacement
of individuals with even less ties to the public community. Such individuals will promote and collude with other individuals to keep themselves in the loop. Also, with many of the policy discussions in GNSO being English, this permanently eliminates persons from developing/emerging economies from non-English from ever participating.
- given that any individual could already participate in GNSO, we would be no different from such random individuals
- it removes the mandate on oversight and accountability on ICANN activities from end user interests
- a thousand individuals in one large country will override 10 individuals from a small country so there will be less diversity in the EMM model only from those countries with large number of individuals.
- Nomcom appointees to ALAC new to ICANN will serve as Liasions to other groups is not sensible

There are many more problems but I want to focus on a IMO a better At-Large model than the EMM one:

- ICANN establishes At-Large Chapters in each country similiar in concept to Rotary or ISOC chapters.
- each chapter is open to anyone interested in ICANN from the interests of end users.
- ICANN can set guidelines for each chapter - some examples: must do certain level of outreach, have term limits, have a public F2F awareness meeting to recruit new persons. ICANN would need to provide some funding to make this happen but this would be small and the chapters can account to ICANN for expenses.
- ICANN can provide the tools (mailing lists, conference tools) to facilitate online discussions.
- Because there is a consistent brand - At-Large Chapter in the country, marketing/promoting is
greatly simplified and easier to explain.
- Given that such chapters are virtual, it makes chapters easy to establish with only a few individuals from a country without the challenges of having formal organisations with bylaws and pay taxes.

So an At-Large chapter ends up being a virtual ALS in each country in the ALAC/RALO/ALS model.

The RALOs will consist of the chapters from each country in the region with each chapter electing two persons to coordinate the RALO work. The RALO will be better positioned to better fulfil its MOUs with ICANN and the RALO and ALAC would not have to bother with analysing whether an organisation meets the criteria of an ALS.

The At-Large chapters will be better able to network with At-Large chapters in other countries and build consensus on policy issues and help promote and grow the At-Large Community.

---
Dev Anand

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