Just wading in  here because while what you are saying is true in that ALSes have not delivered for At-Large what was originally envisaged, but my view is that the real reason was because our (ALAC's) approach and expectations of them were flawed. 

We weren't seeing individuals within the ALSes to their best advantage. There was too much focus on just because only a few individuals were participating from within an ALS, it was of lesser value to us. Yet, having those few active and participating individuals has been really important to our work, and at the same time they have been active promoters of the work of At-Large and ICANN in the local communities of their respective countries. At RALO level, we are now encouraging these active ALS members to send us the evidence of this outreach to our RALO newsletters, to demonstrate how they are impacting the grassroots level, small steps at a time. 

As you say it has taken the ALAC and At-Large a long time to recognise that we need to value our individual members from among our ALSes and as they grow in their knowledge of our work and their confidence in their own participation, to encourage them to educate others and hopefully also engage them with us.  But we must do more to help them with this education and training process, and we are already working on a plan with the GAC to try to get ICANN Org support for more appropriate resources that can help both governments and end-users to enhance their understanding of the issues that are important to ICANN.

 

Although we may not have liked to hear what the Review contained, it was a wake-up call for At-Large. I therefore found it really encouraging that those who actively participated in the development of our Review Implementation Plan, were not just addressing the quick fixes of the At-Large proposal document, but were also focused on continuous improvement in all areas of the work of At-Large. We have now been given an opportunity to address what the underlying issues are for our communities, and one of the things we will be able to do at ATLASIII is to use those in our At-Large community who are already active in our working groups and discussions at both the RALO and ALAC levels and who have experienced the difficulties of engagement, to help us develop improvements in the way we do things with an aim of gaining more individual participants who are better informed, enthusiastic and active in the work we have to do in At-Large.

Maureen