Folks, as a diversion from talking about meeting logistics and organizations, I thought perhaps we could focus for a bit on issues. One of the issues to be discussed by the ALAC in San Juan is what criteria should an candidate ALS meet to be certified as an ALS. The ICANN Bylaws, as appropriate for their level of control, are suitably vague. They say:

The criteria and standards for the certification of At-Large Structures shall be established in such a way that participation by individual Internet users who are citizens or residents of countries within the Geographic Region (as defined in Section 5 of Article VI) of the RALO will predominate in the operation of each At-Large Structure within the RALO, while not necessarily excluding additional participation, compatible with the interests of the individual Internet users within the region, by others. 

This has generally been interpreted by the ALAC to mean that individual members of the organization must either directly (that is, classical Athenian democracy where all members participate in decisions) or more likely, indirectly, by selecting/electing the groups leaders (managers, board, whatever). There has also been another generally accepted philosophy that the group must have a practical way of communicating with its members and there should be some mechanism for getting input back from these members.

This has worked for the vast majority of applicants. However, a number of scenarios have come up where the current interpretation does not seem to come up with the right answer:

- Recently there have been a number of applicants which do not have individual members but rather have other organizations as members. In at least some of the cases, they are known by trusted individuals to be "good ALS material" - that is, they believe in and practice those ideas which we would normally associate with an ALS.

- there are entities that could (vaguely) be called members, but with virtually all relevant communication going outwards only.
In essence, the participants are effectively users of a web site. But again, the organizations principles and sympathies are in line with those we associate with an ALS, and conceptually, incoming communications could be easily added.

- Although it seems generally accepted that an ALS should not primarily be a for-profit business, and there are other venues in ICANN for such businesses, the current rules would not refuse ALS status to for-profit organizations that otherwise meet the criteria.

It is vitally important that ICANN sets and uses an understandable and implementable set of criteria for certifying ALSs. Specifically, the ALAC must establish a process under which all ALAC members are using the same criteria for judging an ALS candidate. Although each member may certainly come to different conclusions about whether criteria are met, they need to be using the same criteria. Moreover, the criteria cannot change capriciously from month to month. If we do not adhere to these principles, we put ICANN in an ethically and legally awkward position.

Therefore, we need to decide on just how we are interpreting the Bylaw wording, or if necessary to achieve our goals, recommend new wording to the Board.

Prior to the Lisbon meeting, Nick distributed a proposed criteria for ALS membership.  It (and French and Spanish translations) can be found at the very bottom of https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?lisbon_documents. I think that it is a good start, but I find there are a number of problems with it.

With no attempt to re-word the document here, I propose that the criteria be altered to include the following:

1. If an organization is composed partly or solely of other organizations, either it can be an ALS, or one or more of its component organizations can be an ALS, but not both.

2. Although an ALS need not have any specific legal organization, but it cannot exist for primarily for-profit reasons.

3. The proposed Criteria 1 be altered to make it clear that an ALS has a responsibility to disseminate information on behalf of ICANN and its RALO, and to solicit feedback from its individual user participants.

4. If any of the criteria which qualify an ALS for certification changes, the ALS is obliged to bring this to the attention of its RALO which must in turn involve ICANN At-Large support and/or the ALAC.

Comments from ALAC members and from interested individuals PRIOR TO THE SAN JUAN MEETING would be very helpful, both on Nick's original document as well as my thoughts here.

Alan