On 09/24/2009 01:58 PM, Alan Greenberg wrote: I don't agree with your reading. First of all, the ALAC is an "Advisory Committee" not a "Supporting Organization". The history of ICANN demonstrates that those are rather different things. Second you are hanging a lot on the word "select" (and variations of that word). There is a lot of history behind "select" - California law imposes a number of (good) requirements on "membership" corporations, which arise when there is an election to fill board seats. ICANN danced around that and made a big deal about calling the elections "selections" in order to evade the statute. See: http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/platform.htm#full-members By-the-way, "select" != "appoint". Third you found an instance in which the bylaws use the word At-Large Community. I don't read that use as defining an equivalence between "At-Large Community" and ALAC+RALO+ALS, particularly in light of the subsequent j.3 that suggests that "community" is something more broad. And finally the board resolution referred to and approved a board working group recommendation that was based on our ALAC review working group recommendation - and in our recommendation we made it very clear that we intended a broad reading that went beyond the bounds of the existing ALAC to encompass every user of the net. I have serious doubts that we would have been able to muster a majority on our working group had our recommendation be that that the board seats only be open to- and selected by- ALAC/RALO/ALS people. Apart from semantically nit-picking apart the board resolution, it is hard to reconcile ICANN as a "public-benefit" body (which is what it is under the law of its incorporation) with the dependent ALAC/RALO/ALS tangle as the sole path to onto ICANN's primary decision making bodies. I (and others) had to fight hard to get our working group to overturn the Westlake recommendation that there be no publicly chosen directors. I would not have bothered had our goal been to make it an ALAC/RALO/ALS-only process. --karl--