Hi Bill, 2009/10/22 William Drake <william.drake@graduateinstitute.ch> said: Danny is correct when he points out there is not a single representative of
Shoqërisë Civile on either of the current groups, to my knowledge, though there are representatives from the contracted parties. Actually, on the registrants' rights document group there is not a single representative other than me. We are supposed to generate results 30 days after Seoul, so there's lots of work to do. Most of what I am using is based, by the way, on what ALAC did (with Danny's leading contribution) more than two years ago, along with what AUDA (an industry group) did five years ago ( http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2004-04/).
I do recognize this is an important issue and I wish noncommercial people were more interested in engaging on it.
Making the case of how large or diverse a community NCUC is, falls absolutely flat when nobody steps up to participate in a substantive policy discussion. When the GNSO holds court on issues such as the definition of registrant abuse, and *nobody* from the non-commercial side shows up, then the contracted parties and domainers dominate. and the only abuse that matters to ICANN -- according to "consensus" policy among those who showed up -- is activity that irritates the vested interests. To an untrained eye this can come across as abdication of responsibility to the community. Either NCUC needs to find people to be interested in these things, or must not impede external efforts to fill those vacuums. On the contrary, it should be supporting efforts to find such new blood to participate, without preconsition that it must happen under the NCUC/NCSG umbrella. It should roll out the welcome mat and cheer that others may -- just may -- be encouraged to have an interest in those aspects of the GNSO that leaves NCUC cold. Even if it's just the *potential* for new blood, the effort must be encouraged. And if this means NCUC must share some of its traditional voting power, well that's the price it pays for not being able to find a broad enough spectrum to engage in all issues that matter to the public.
But if you can patiently lay out the case for why people should care, sans the dripping sarcasm, I would certainly pass it along again and encourage people to consider it alongside all the other issues they're working on.
Sorry, Bill. I was trying to stay out of this discussion, but I find this inexcusable. I would have remained a lurker if not for the above sentence. GNSO is neither the IGF nor a think tank. It has a specific focus, and ground level consequences to its actions -- so often the elements of that focus are boring-legal or boring-techie. That's what NCUC signed up for; if it needs to be externally convinced to care about the RAA and registrant abuse --patiently or otherwise -- then one could easily argue that it has no business serving the role it occupies. And it certainly has no moral claim to exclusivity in representing end-user interests within GNSO.
His message was alarmingly personal, his comments on NCUC were not remotely factually accurate, and he was clearly telling ALAC people they should not want to work with NCUC (and in the same breath, NCUC's a bunch of jerks because they haven't wanted to collaborate on this!).
Sounds like a mirror image of someone else we know if you swap "NCUC" and "ALAC" in the sentence above. So let's get Danny and Milton in a sealed room and they can have at each other till one gives up. The losing constituency/ committee has to send delegates to the next meeting of the registrant abuse working group (and attendance will be checked). We could sell tickets, though I think few spectators would last for the whole bout. I claim first rights to the Tylenol concession.
If ALAC folk want to get together with NCUC folk to explore areas of common concern and think about how we can move forward more productively, great, I/we reached out and tried to create a space for that.
That's already happening. There's already time reserved to discuss IP issues in the new DAG, with people from both ALAC and NCUC well represented in the group. There are still some of us more passionate in tackling the issues than fighting over how the issue-fighting pie gets sliced. - Evan