Karl Auerbach ha scritto:
In response to Evan Leibovitch:
I'd like to throw a few considerations into this discussion. 1) It may well be true that the At Large community in California (and in some other places, e.g. Germany) presently is less vibrant and populated than it was in 2000. However, it is also true that the opposite has happened in several other parts of the world: if you compare the present level of activity in Latin America or Africa with the degree of participation in the 2000 elections, or if you consider the availability of non-English material and discussion about ICANN, I think that we have seen significant progress. 2) Also, a part - I don't know whether big or small - of the attention, media coverage and participation that ICANN got in year 2000 was definitely connected to ICANN being new, and to the Internet being the newest, coolest thing all over the world. We were at the peak of the "dot com" bubble and people still believed in the "independency of cyberspace". I wonder whether, even with direct elections, participation would not have faded in the same way - maybe less and less abruptly than it did, but I think that many people just got used at ICANN and at the Internet, and lost interest. 3) In any case, the fact that we do not have direct, individual-based elections for ALAC members is just a choice by the RALOs. The RALO were meant to be a sort of "electoral roll" and coordination point for appointments in each Region, but there was no requirement for them to become a fully fledged organization. I would be very happy if NARALO decided to keep an individual-based electoral roll, joining together the memberships of its ALSes and any individual wishing to participate directly, and held direct elections to pick its ALAC members. At least we'd see how well it works in practice ten years later. 4) Similarly, nothing prevents the ALAC from proposing a selection method for the two ALAC-appointed Board members that relies on direct elections. I don't know how well it would fly with the ICANN Board, though. Ciao, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------