Roberto, Sometimes one wants to know if anyone on the board is listening... Sometimes there is a value in the exchange of ideas... Sometimes one hopes that those in charge actually have a plan to deal with a situation rather than allowing a bad situation to fester.... Sometimes Board-level leadership is appreciated... and sometimes one asks a question in the hopes of getting a real answer, not just vapid replies that if the ALAC places nice for the next several years that maybe sometime in the far distant future the board will graciously consider a request for representative status. How very noble. Reminds me of the Board response to the IDNO petitions... and the Board response to the ALSC consensus recommendations... perhaps "let them eat cake" should become the official board motto.. regards, Danny --- Roberto Gaetano <roberto@icann.org> wrote:
Danny, Why did you ask my opinion? Cheers, Roberto
-----Original Message----- From: Danny Younger [mailto:dannyyounger@yahoo.com] Sent: 19 October 2007 15:17 To: Roberto Gaetano; 'At-Large Worldwide' Subject: RE: [At-Large] Next version of the Frameworks and Principles forAccountability and Transparency
Roberto,
In that you have served as Chair of the GA, you well understand that there has always been a group whose views have never had an advocate in the GNSO Council. These are the people in the periphery, the registrants, the users, the concerned members of the public that have no identifiable constituency to safeguard their interests. Their points of view are usually ignored, set aside, disregarded or condemned by the special-interest communities that won't make room for another seat at the table. This has led to bad policy development, with the new gTLD recommendations being just the latest example of what happens when these special interests fail to accomodate views held by the public at large -- it then forces members of the board to return the recommendations for further work because the recommendations are inherently flawed.
This system, that grants a seat at the table to everyone except the public advocates, is destroying ICANN. We have bad decision-making at the GNSO-level and even worse decision-making at the Board level because of your stubborn refusal to respect the representative principle.
There is no need to "build" the views of the disenfranchised; they are perfectly capable of make their needs known (just look at all the comments posted on RegisterFly). The only need is to allow the disenfranchised a seat at the table so that a panorama of views can be evaluated.
Every other community has their representatives seated on the Board. To continue discriminating against the public is arrogant in the extreme, and you will recall that the earlier IAHC failed precisely because it was criticized as being insufficiently representative.
While I continue to appreciate your expression of your personal views on this matter, don't you think that it's time (in light of all the review activities underway -- GNSO Review, ALAC Review, NonCom Review, Board Review) to take up, at a Board Level, the issue of user "representation"? Or perhaps you think that the US DOC will grant ICANN
independence in spite of ICANN having made no efforts to deal with its representative imbalance...
--- Roberto Gaetano <roberto@icann.org> wrote:
Danny,
We discussed this several times in different contexts, so you know already the answer. First of all, I have a different approach. To me voting rights are the means to achieve a result, not the result itself. So my first question has always been: "Voting rights to do what?". And if the answer is "To bring the point of view of disenfranchised people to the table" my answer has always been: "In this case, let's start to build the point of view of the disenfranchised people, and put it forward. If it has merit, we will be better off in asking for voting rights to support it". What I saw in other attempts to get representation for people and entities like individual registrants, is that most of the discussion goes on complaining not to have voting power, the next big chunk on administrivia, close to zero goes to actually discuss the issues, and less than zero to achieve a common position (in the sense that if by chance there is a message who tries to build, within minutes you have half a dozen replies aimed to destroy). ALAC, up to now, has not taken this route, and I hope it does not. I hope that, now that the organizational efforts have given results (in spite of the ones, including you, who attempted to sabotage the formation process), we can concentrate on what the purpose of ALAC is: to produce policy documents reflecting the opinions of the at-large membership that ALAC represents.
I have had the great honour of being the ALAC Liaison to the Board for three years. I have witnessed the change in the general attitude of the Board over time, and this was in great essence to the quality of the documents produced by ALAC and presented to the Board. True, these documents were reflecting only the opinion of some 15 people, not the millions of users. But now that the ALAC structure is in place we have the chance to give more power to the new documents that will be coming from a wider consultation. If this will happen, we can substantate our request for a seat at the table. If this does not happen, our claims for representation will have the same value as dogs barking to the moon: mucho ruido y pocas nueces.
Hence, my implicit suggestion for giving priority to policy development.
Cheers, Roberto
-----Original Message----- From: Danny Younger [mailto:dannyyounger@yahoo.com] Sent: 19 October 2007 02:54 To: Roberto Gaetano; 'At-Large Worldwide' Subject: RE: [At-Large] Next version of the
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