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. As Evan pointed out, ICANN related issues is a only a small part of what ALSes have to address. At the local level, our user base may have other, more pressing issues. In our case, the local competition for access to broadband is seen as a priority, and the introduction of new gTLDs a much less important issue (we here are mostly cctld users). The fact is also that the ALAC is supposed to give well thought out comments on a wide range of issues which require a good level of expertise in various fields: technical, legal, commercial, which are further divided into specialized areas. I am not sure we have all that knowledge within ALAC and ALSes. And even when we have those resources, how can we get them to provide reports on time, given this is mostly a volunteer effort ? 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. 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 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. Patrick