On 08/30/2010 02:25 PM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
Le 30/08/2010 22:54, Karl Auerbach a écrit :
Put the promised 50%+ of ICANN's board seats up for public election from slates of candidates who need pass no insider nomination process and I guarantee you that the public participation in ICANN would go up by many orders of decimal magnitude.
Over 50% of the Board seats are selected by NOMCOM. Anyone can apply. Add the At Large Director seat, and whilst it's not a direct public election either, it looks to me like a process that cannot be captured as easily as direct elections (which is what led to the reform in the first place).
The "nominating committee" - It ought to have its name corrected because it "appoints" rather than "nominates". That body, although it has made nice selections (and I use the word "nice" with all of its English ambiguous nuance), that committee has essentially been like one of those barrels that one uses to polish stones - neither stone nor person comes out with any edge or sharpness. Like most such committees the choices are compromises made by people who obtained their seats on the committee largely because they are status-quo oriented in the first place - thus a tendency for like to "nominate" like. The community of internet users, like most bodies of natural people, ought to have the power to chose who it wishes, even if those people are of the nature that would cause a nominating committee to choke. ICANN's system - including the nominating committee - was designed with the specific intent of keeping out the noisy riff-raff who might question the status quo - people like me. And, going back the the prior point - the reason why people are staying out of ICANN and the ALAC in droves is precisely because of the isolation between those people and ICANN that results from the intervention of the "nominating" committee and the ALAC+RALO+ALS system. Sleeping Beauty's prince had a better chance to get through that thicket of thorns than internet users have to exercise their will through the multilayer armor of ICANN's ALAC+RALO+ALS. Give the community of internet users a "stake" and power to have effect within ICANN comparable to that of Verisign or PIR or the trademark community and people would participate just as they did in the hundreds of thousands in year 2000. ICANN's has legal existence explicitly to serve the public interest. It is sad that such a thick firewall has been erected by ICANN against that public from having any but a highly filtered and derivative role. Many, perhaps most, people will not step off the sidewalk to pick up a penny in the gutter - they perceive the value to be too small to be worth getting their hands and clothes dirty. The same equation - too little value to justify even a small risk - that is what is keeping internet users out of ICANN. --karl--