Please be careful about thinking endorsements have been orchestrated. It's not been the case, at least not in the negative sense of that word. There was long discussion about the proposal on the WSIS civil society Internet Governance Caucus list <http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/arc/governance>. It was agreed the caucus would endorse the proposal and individual sign-up by organizations was also invited. I can see a lot of names I recognize and expect came from there, and also a few members of the OECD's Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council (CSISAC) where some of the NCUC's executive committee also active. As there are now two comments on the charter petition page claiming the NCUC proposal fails in terms of diversity and representativeness, I think important to make clear there were efforts to have the proposal discussed and supported. I think the NCUC's sign-up efforts were quite genuine. Thanks, Adam
Hello
On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Brendler, Beau <<mailto:Brenbe@consumer.org>Brenbe@consumer.org> wrote:
Carlos wrote:
"I'm concern about the NCUC proposal because is very complicated to understand, and this means the continuity of the old participants."
My sentiments exactly. Trying to explain that charter to consumer groups, for me, is a non-starter.
Hello
Even within the ICT space, ICANN is not so well known by everyone. On the task of outreach, one has to first explain what ICANN is, what it manages, then about the various constituencies and then about Public Participation and User's representation in ICANN. When all this already so complicated, the outreach effort has to explain the technical distinctions between two different User constituencies and this would add to all the confusion.
As Adam points out outreach efforts require the support of ICANN and now this support also needs to be split between two different outreach efforts. We will have the at-Large outreach and then the NCSG outreach.
Wolf talks about being silent as a way of expressing some of disagreements, but in an ecosystem of written records by way of documentation and public comments, 'silence' can't be read, except by an insightful inner circle, who themselves may not be able to act on the unspoken views.
What probably deters us is the resignation that ALAC's comments and objections at this stage might not have an effect on the NCSG proposal which is half way into the process. I think we should go ahead and make our observations without worrying about the timing and impact of our comments. It is necessary to say the right thing rather than be withdrawn about the developments underway.
The Civil Society endorsements that I see are not representative. There are CS groups endorsing the NCSG proposal but it is to be examined if these orchestrated endorsements reflect a universally balanced user's viewpoint. Nevertheless it goes on record and the record so created apparently looks good - so many signatures, so many endorsements from different corners !
It is exactly for this reason that ALAC needs to speak up. There has been tremendous activity in the at-Large community particularly during the last 6 or 9 months, and ICANN might rather project the recent developments to get an idea of the potential for the at-Large community to emerge as a wider, truly representative voice and focus on its support to making the at-Large community evolve, fine-tune and grow further.
There appear to be greater dangers of a subtle form of capture in the way NCSG proposal is taking shape. This is a broader consideration that needs to be debated further.
Sivasubramanian Muthusamy
India.