Dear Olivier, Patrick, this time let me not boast Nick's lack of official answer and try to help in documenting the france@large experience in terms of ICANN attendance. The very first action of france@large was for its two founders to attend the ICANN Marina del Rey meeting at their personnal expense. It took me eight years to build france@large with some active but often temporary help - and we still are only around 80 interactors (with less traffic due to Staff's attitude). Let me reminde that I think know about "@large-ing": I created Intlnet 30 years ago as the ICANN of the time. I created france@large at a good time (ICANN BoD @large election, with the other candidates - 2000). I was active at the GNSO/GA under Roberto and Harald and then Dabby, and WG-Review (and a candidate to the BoD - 2001) and elected at Joop's IDNO. I co-created icannatlarge.org (started by Esther Dyson, a combative first ICANN Chair), being then elected on its panel, and organizing its last election that more or less lead to ALAC creation. I incorporated (2004) ATLARGE (and restrained it to give ALAC more lee way, exposure and chances within the ICANN structure). The first difficulty I observed is the ambiguous position of ISOC irt. ICANN and IETF. The two logic everyone would understand easily are that: - either ICANN be an ISOC affiliate, as IETF is. In that logic the Internet ordinary users would find a home and support in ISOC, while more active users in different area would find a forum and a representation in ALAC. - or IETF has nothing to do with ISOC. This would mean that ISOC could be an ICANN user constituency and/or a part of ALAC. Since the France experience seems to be the most complex, sophisticated or advanced, I think it is worth to analyse it to the ALAC and ALS common benefit. I copy Louis Pouzin. Sebastien Bachollet is this list. They can correct me. This year we observed in France that: 1. france@large first decided to come out, due to the coming of ICANN. It was actually to help ISOC France organizing its welcome and get the local community attending. The Staff's attitude was politically foreseeable due. Actually, I considered it a test to know if ATLARGE had also to come out (it will). Nevertheless, we played our role and have some reasons to believe that we helped the Paris record attendance. 2. during the year ISOC France collapsed, mostly because it only defended "user centric and 'American' values", instead of "people centric" (cf. WSIS) ones, and did not permit user to affirm international positions. There are various local ego and political reasons to this collapse, but there obviously are also general reasons. IMHO, the main one, I do regret as an ISOC Sustaining Member, is the poor HQ response to the situation. Something which hampered some of us was the low readability of the joint ISOC/ICANN position regarding the NonCom and ALAC. Why are there ISOC Chapters in both? Why has ISOC clearly specified (European Meeting) that they wanted to keep ALAC in DNS issues to protect their own "market"? 3. this reflected a general "Refoundation" agreement among the majority of the French CS active Members. There were however three visions: - a more organised ISOC France, continuing to gather the two other approaches with new by-laws (Sebastien Bachollet). This was reasonable, but it was defeated by ISOC HQ asking a French candidate to the Board to remove himself, making ISOC HQ lose democratic credibility and the ISOC Chapter BoD lose legitimacy. - rejuvenating of ISOC in France : a clear come back to the ISOC principle and values, as a practical inspiration to the Internet development (My position). This included provincial Chapters and the support of world thematic chapters (IPv6 Users, Externets and TLDs, Multilinguistics, etc.) for an alliance between users (daily operations) and @large lead users from france@large (I chair) and a rejuvenated ATLARGE. The target was to jointly correct Internet misgovernance issues and sort out the CS unbalance between professionals and users. My candidacy open site http://refondation-isoc.fr has now become http://cisoc.fr as a French cultural fellow-citizen proposition to generalize good governance principles upon ISO or "Open Network Standards" norms - ethically generalizing and extending RFCs and other standards. - a common house for the French Internet citizens. The interest is not network centric, nor user (customer) but citizen centric. The name they chose Louis Pouzin proposed, is very clear. It is not the Internet Society in France. But, "la Société Française de l'Internet", the French Society on the Internet. Their interest is in real French and local life through an adequate Interneting, in agreement with their vision and the observed life of the society. Their target is not a "Chapter", but a large association, with thousand(s) Members. As a france@large Chair, I fully support their project because it is complementary of @large and ISOC, however they made all of us to waste a lof of time, efforts and opportunities and, in the process, they did boycott the ICANN meeting and the World Internet Week de Paris. Based on this experience I can evaluate their deeper commonality is a vision of the Internet as an English ASCII US data network legacy they have to adapt, instead of a service adapted to them. Why then to attend its meetings (ICANN, IETF, ISOC) when you do not speak perfect English and want the Internet to multinationalize. You know the project is to internationalize it enough to sell your country/culture names for K$ 185 + 75 @ annum to foreign interests that will screw them up. From my experience, when we were still discussing the ML-DNS consideration at IETF/WG-IDNABIS and got Nick's unofficial answer, it was much easier to get 10 person joining an anti-ICANN demonstration in front of the Hotel, than one to attend inside! And most who came carried a smile about the way "these Americans" does it. Not that we would do it better, but most probably different. I do not see why it would be any different with Egyptian. Only that they have 4,000 years more of experience about semiotics than ourselves. jfc At 09:52 19/11/2008, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
Have you considered that perhaps ICANN has been beating the new gTLD drum for so long, the local community simply has other concerns?
This, to me, is a proof that ICANN is just not inline with the challenges facing the Internet today. Prompted by a small group of companies which are solely domain-name registries/registrars, ICANN is dazed by a complete focus on domain name issues and tries to kid itself that other issues such as IPv6 migration/transition for example, are none of its business. Have you asked yourself whether Mr. Egyptian Joe or Egyptian Co. Inc. is bothered about domain names? Domain names are a rich man's game.
Evan, with all due respect, you should not be "disgusted" that the local community did not attend. Much rather, you should be concerned and we should all work together to try and find out why it ended up this way.
Warm regards,
Olivier
-- Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond, Ph.D Global Information Highway Ltd http://www.gih.com/ocl.html
----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Vande Walle" <patrick@vande-walle.eu> To: "At-Large Worldwide" <at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Cc: <kieren.mccarthy@icann.org>; <na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 8:39 AM Subject: Re: [At-Large] [NA-Discuss] Letter to the Board
On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:25:19 -0500, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org>
wrote:
I was disgusted by the fact that NOT one of the "local community" bothered to attend the actual conference. Perhaps they would have understood, having done so, that ICANN is not IGF.
I agree with Evan.
I will add that the local Internet community's concerns may not fit
into
ICANN's narrow mandate. When we tried to outreach to the local community for the ICANN meeting in Luxembourg, we found out that the individual users concern at the time was mainly the high price of broadband access, not the allocation of globally unique identifiers on the Internet. 3 years later, it still remains a challenge at the ALS level to get meaningful input from our membership on issues that are within the mandate of ICANN. So much for local Internet community involvement.
I think it is crucial not to turn the ALAC, RALOs and At-large into a generic end user caucus on all Internet issues. We need to remain focused if we want to be relevant.
Patrick
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