At 24/09/2009 06:52 PM, Karl Auerbach wrote:
I don't agree with your reading.
First of all, the ALAC is an "Advisory Committee" not a "Supporting Organization". The history of ICANN demonstrates that those are rather different things.
True, but the addition of a voting board member is a new innovation, and so I was looking at the only other lace where such board members are named by part of the organization.
Second you are hanging a lot on the word "select" (and variations of that word). There is a lot of history behind "select" - California law imposes a number of (good) requirements on "membership" corporations, which arise when there is an election to fill board seats. ICANN danced around that and made a big deal about calling the elections "selections" in order to evade the statute. See: http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/platform.htm#full-members
By-the-way, "select" != "appoint".
Actually, I was not hanging anything on the word "select" and in fact I used the term "select/elect". I was just copying the wording in the Bylaws.
Third you found an instance in which the bylaws use the word At-Large Community. I don't read that use as defining an equivalence between "At-Large Community" and ALAC+RALO+ALS, particularly in light of the subsequent j.3 that suggests that "community" is something more broad.
The wording in j.3 is :Promoting outreach activities in the community of individual Internet users" which I took to say that "the "At-Large Community" (ALC) should do further outreach, not that they were one. If they were part of the ALC, they would have been included in the previous section. But perhaps that is just my reading.
And finally the board resolution referred to and approved a board working group recommendation that was based on our ALAC review working group recommendation - and in our recommendation we made it very clear that we intended a broad reading that went beyond the bounds of the existing ALAC to encompass every user of the net.
I have serious doubts that we would have been able to muster a majority on our working group had our recommendation be that that the board seats only be open to- and selected by- ALAC/RALO/ALS people.
Apart from semantically nit-picking apart the board resolution, it is hard to reconcile ICANN as a "public-benefit" body (which is what it is under the law of its incorporation) with the dependent ALAC/RALO/ALS tangle as the sole path to onto ICANN's primary decision making bodies.
I (and others) had to fight hard to get our working group to overturn the Westlake recommendation that there be no publicly chosen directors. I would not have bothered had our goal been to make it an ALAC/RALO/ALS-only process.
--karl--
All of that is no doubt an accurate reading of the situation. But not being privy to the Internet discussions in the review committee, the SIC or the Board, I can only go with what has been publicly presented. I have no illusion as to what the "truth" is, or even what the proper way forward is. I was just presenting my reading of the Bylaws in relation to the subject at hand. But I am encouraged by the good (and civil) debate going on here... Alan