Adam Peake ha scritto:
So the ALS encourage their members to get involved in the regional discuss lists? Are they successful?
It's often the opposite, there is someone inside an ALS who particularly cares about ICANN issues, so raises awareness inside his/her organization, gets it accredited, and participates in discussions, getting back to the ALS mailing list or assembly when there is something interesting to report or to discuss. All in all, I tend to see one, sometimes two active individuals per ALS, though you'd have to get into each individual ALS to understand how much they liaise back with their own community. There are not hundreds of individuals eager to participate in ICANN policy discussions anyway (we don't do consumer surveys for ICANN, by the way - should we? we've been discussing that sometimes, but I don't see how a group of volunteers could do that kind of work in a statistically meaningful way on a global scale).
I've been trying to work out what role (if any) the ALS and perhaps those lists were playing in informing users. It's not clear to me how the ALS (therefore RALO and ALAC) are supporting this commitment to informed participation etc. And as I've tried to explain, given the review (of ALAC and NomCom), Vint's and other's comments, if ALAC can show it is really representing user interests through a solid "bottom-up" process, then it has a opportunities for much greater influence in ICANN.
Current set up seems as though there is almost a cutoff between the individuals who should be the membership of ALS
"should be"? All the ALSes have individual members (even if we now have orgs of orgs pushing to get in, and getting quite upset if we tell them no, so they might be allowed to join in the future).
and policy development. They are asked to join one organization so they can be recognized, then join a different group to discuss policy. Organise locally, but discuss policy regionally. Awkward, no?
You usually don't join an ALS just to participate in ICANN. You already formed a group locally that deals with this kind of issues, then you decide that you want to be involved in ICANN directly, and you sign up. It's also very unlikely that you're interested in ICANN and nothing else, more likely you're interested in broad Internet governance issues (possibly more in the content-related ones) and pick ICANN as a part of it when something particularly interesting comes up there.
I might be confused, perhaps you could point to the policy discussion of the ALS you represent and the other ALS that have recently formed the EU RALO? How many of your ALS members (ISOC IT) subscribe of the EU RALO discuss list?
None but me. They delegate me to take care of this. ISOC Italy is an organization with about 100 members, most of which join just to stay tuned and support the education and lobbying activities that we do. About a third, I'd say, is active on the internal general discussion mailing list. A few of them are active beyond that, e.g. Council members, and among them they take responsibilities for different parts of the job. So I took ICANN because I liked it :) Why do you think that it could be different? Do you really expect, say, 25 people * 20 ALSes = 500 individuals active at the European level on the same mailing list on ICANN-related issues? That'd be quite an unintelligible discussion, by the way. Most people like to support and delegate work to someone else :)
I have a feeling that without clear evidence that the policy coming from ALAC is representative of individual users views, then ALAC will never grow beyond it's current weak position in ICANN's organizational structure.
It is representative to the extent that people are actually interested not just in discussing these arcane issues like on any web forum (or like at the pub, in front of a beer) but actually devoting a lot of time for actual participation in policy making processes. Certainly there might be issues (e.g. .xxx) where thousands of end users have strong views, but they'll never bother to join any kind of process just for that - they'll just flood paul.twomey@icann.org with form letters (which, by the way, is what actually happened with .xxx). It is not this kind of "user participation" that we are talking about. We are talking about a much smaller subset of users that are interested in advocating user views and participating to painfully slow policy making processes over a span of several years - and of course there's very few of them. So we have a complex structure to ensure that those few have some kind of representational selection process behind them, which of course is more objective and legitimate as the number of participants grows up.
Why set the bar low for ALAC? ALAC's task is to represent individuals, we should set our own standards, not look to how others have got out of their commitments.
Fair point, but pardon me if I'm somewhat reluctant to start again questioning the legitimacy of this process after several years. In terms of transparency, I think that we're as open as one could be. In terms of accessibility, any user group in the world can join for free, and is likely to find people in their own Region as a friendly contact, possibly in their own language. We can discuss how effective we were in reaching out, and of course anything can be made better, but only within reasonable expectations - and we welcome practical proposals on how to make things better, if you have any. On the other hand, if the requirement is that we have to get each of one billion Internet users to sign up explicitly to our mailing list, for us to be legitimate... do you really mean that? I don't think so. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------