Evan Firstly my comment Is not a criticism of those who wrote the AT large board documents but rather an observation that even somebody like myself who was involved in the pre and post ICANN era taking a look at recent developments is having a hard time working out what is going on and why. Your note increases the concern. ICANN is NOT a trade association. ICANN is NOT technical body. ICANN is NOT an international treaty organisation. ICANN is chartered to co-ordinate the management of a few of the Internet's unique resources. Above all ICANN does not own any of these resources. So it operates through rough consensus of the community at hand. When ICANN was mooted the primary concern was to maintain the user as the centre of Internet evolution because this promotes innovation through continuity of what was and remains regarded as the highly successful bottom up Internet model. Anything that detracts from that vision is a distraction. If the user interest is to be kept at the forefront of ICANN's concerns then it is vitally important that ICANN remains accessible and addressable by people who do not have full time jobs voluntary or paid, involved in or around ICANN. best regards Christian On 12 Jan 2010, at 15:43, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Hello Christian,
2010/1/12 Christian de Larrinaga <cdel@firsthand.net>
A lot of work has gone into this document but I could not get through even the executive summary which is impenetrable due to an exceptionally deep sprinkling of acronyms. It is obvious that there is a hardening of the veins of who is involved at ICANN and where these terms are presumably obvious.
Some are clearly new even to the authors as they do get explained in the text. But the bulk are left to the Glossary (which is excellent). But a Glossary is a poor excuse for an over exuberance of new building of stuffing in ICANN over recent years whose purposes is not clear nor unambiguous.
Your message is heard loud and clear (by me at least).
In my (relatively short) time working within ICANN as a volunteer I have found its processes to be extremely complex to navigate. At times, ICANN presents the facade of a purely technical body, or a trade association, or an international treaty organization, or bits and pieces of all three. This fact has produced in ICANN an extremely unusual corporate culture that takes considerable effort to penetrate. And given the various competing interests of governments, business users, sellers of Internet services, community groups, would-be registries, domainers and others, it's unlikely that the structure is easily simplified. One need go no further than the attempted re-organization of the non-commercial constituencies within the powerful GNSO to see how -- even within the end-user community -- change is difficult and simplification doubly so.
One important role At LARGE should have is to keep policies over unique Internet resources accessible to users. This means pruning the profusion of committees, structures, boards and complexity of interactions and politics between them across ICANN by demanding that only entities that have a clear unambiguous and practical role following the Internet model are continued and all such activities have a limited lifespan.
Half the trick is knowing what needs to be dismantled. Indeed most of the committees within ICANN have fixed mandates and dissolve after their work is done; however for each one that has completed its task, another one rises up to address a new issue. Part of the purpose of At-Large (ie, the formally defined infrastructure) is to try to offer a gateway between the complexity of ICANN and the simplicity required by the global community of Internet users.
I am very worried by the way users are increasingly isolated by the growing over complexity in structure, language and difficulty to judge relevance and usefulness. How are users who have deep stake in the ultimate outcomes at ICANN to get meaningfully involved when they can spend only a small amount of time and resource on keeping 'au fait'?
At Large must focus on keeping ICANN down to size and can start doing this on itself.
The ALAC (and overall At-Large infrastructure) recently went through a formal review that involved third-party consultants, members of the ICANN board and a global public consultation process. The report and recommendations of that Review are, in part, why we are here -- because it is that review that recommended that At-Large be able to appoint directors to the ICANN board. (That report is referenced in the Background section of the White Paper, which provides a link to it.)
In other words, At-Large has already (and very recently) been involved in an extensive process of evaluation by itself and the rest of ICANN. Given that we are fairly stressed for human resources (and most of those are volunteers with day jobs), it has been a choice by most of us to spend our energies observing and trying to affect ICANN policy that effects end-users.
I personally believe that having ICANN do the Right Thing (from the public point of view) is more important than the size of the organization. But you're welcome to disagree, and to get involved to advocate the change you want to see.
As with any group of volunteers, At-Large is driven by the efforts of people who do the work, (in our case, guided by the ALSs and regional participants that get involved). Talk is cheap. If you're interested in streamlining ICANN and At-Large, you are invited to get involved and help to do that.
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