Thanks for your note Patrick - see below On 15 Oct 2007, at 11:51, Patrick Vande Walle wrote:
Nick Ashton-Hart wrote:
FYI, for the edification of those who do not know, ICANN is well aware that there is a real need for information about ICANN, its processes, the issues being dealt with
We are ordering translations for LA FWIW. I hope this helps with this particular issue.
Thanks Nick, this exactly what are looking for: short documents in plain French (in our case) rather than English ICANNese. This will hopefully help us inform our community about the current issues in a way they can understand, and address Adam's concerns.
To be honest, I would personally appreciate reading such documents. As a native English speaker, some of our texts are difficult to understand; for non-native speakers it must be really tough at times.
I am not convinced asking them to join a specific WG mailing list is sufficient to provide good interactions with other constitutencies and get really involved in discussions. Try, for example, to have a ten minute conversation with a DNSSEC or IDN technical expert and you are most likely to find out that the "simple" requirements of the end-user community are actually difficult to implement and may need to be reformulated in a more realistic way. It can only happen in F2F meetings.
I am not convinced that this is actually the case. I certainly do not believe that the entire conversation about such an issue requires a F2F meeting. To take your example, there is nothing to prevent me organising a suitable expert on these technologies to be available for a telephonic briefing. This could be recorded and made available for those not able to ask questions. Those interested in developing a position on securing the DNS could then go away, discuss what they believe should be said, including via teleconferences to narrow options and discuss, and at the end if necessary a further expert- briefing on the resulting draft could be arranged again.
Nick mentioned ICANN funds 105 travels a year for ALAC. I understand that this year's budget was mainly used to get the ALSes to meetings to sign the MoU. However, there are not 35 people on the ALAC, so next year
Actually this is not true I'm afraid. The purpose of travel funding is to allow one representative from each ALS to attend ICANN meetings when they are in their region. The reason that there are 35 people supported for each ICANN meeting is so that 20 people from the region nearest the meeting can attend in person. For the remainder of this year, only one meeting will involve signing ceremonies, the one in Asia (for the Asian region of course). The other meeting in Paris will host the EURALO members who will not be signing anything (that I know of anyway).
there should be a possibility to fund the travel of WG participants. However good remote participation can be organized, it still often fails on the technical side. It will never replace a F2F meeting.
On the contrary, again I must disagree. Every other community of ICANN manages to do the vast majority of their policy development work on mailing lists and teleconferences. At-Large can do the same, and the point of the working groups is to allow teams of people who are particularly interested in a given subject to work together on it. That modality has already produced two outputs: on the RAA, and on IDNs - there's no reason that it cannot work on other issues - and indeed it is now being used to work on other issues.