Evan Leibovitch ha scritto:

When Jacob 'recruited' our group last year, attendees at the meeting were asked about issues that were important. Things such as domain kiting and the triple-x TLD were at the top of the list. And yet... while the rejection of XXX has been all over the news, the issue never came up on these lists. I'd told my group's constitutents last year that we were part of the advisory process, yet I can't even say that we were informed of the decision before the media was, on an issue of widespread public interest.

[out of lurk mode] Hello - for those who do not know me yet, I am one of the European ALAC members, and the current Board liaison for the At Large. I do not want to interfere with your discussions, as - being one of the people who came up with the regional subdivision idea almost five years ago - I strongly believe that each Region should feel free to work as it likes. However, being your liaison to the ICANN Board, I wanted to clarify about the above. No one was informed of the decision on .xxx before it was taken publicly at the Lisbon meeting, first of all because - while of course the Board, after the long and extensive discussions, had a sense of where the majority was going - everyone could still change their vote until the very moment that it was cast; and we knew that it was going to be a tight call. And secondly, because Board members, especially on such a delicate and lawsuit-prone matter, have a duty of confidentiality. On the other hand, what was possible and actually happened is that the At Large could provide input to the Board as a constituency (of course each of us is free to also provide input to the Board directly, using the public comment opportunities). I solicited several times the ALAC to prepare a public statement, but in the end we realized that there was no real consensus, so what I said instead (see the transcript of the public Board session) is that there were different opinions (which is a perfectly reasonable advice to the Board). However, some of the North American ALAC members were the staunchest speakers in favour of approving .xxx, and so this was also part of my statement. In the RALO model, the role of the ALAC members is to act as a channel between the Region and the ALAC: they should speak on behalf of the group, and possibly solicit agreed positions (even if sometimes there is the need for almost immediate reaction, which might not make it possible to go through a full consultation cycle). IMHO you should finalize the RALO structure as soon as possible, and work out proper procedures to make that channel work. On the other hand, my "job" (unpaid, of course...) is to bring views from the global At Large community to the ICANN Board. So if you ever felt like there is something being discussed at the Board level and on which you want to provide an opinion or get more information, feel free to drop me an email. I try to keep up with my inbox, it's not always easy but I promise I'll do my best. I also try to ask for views to the global At Large list (I hope you're on that as well) whenever this is possible, given that, as I said, part of what I get to know as a non-voting Board member is confidential. Specifically, after the Registerfly case, I've been working both on the ALAC resolution on that matter (again, I hope it was circulated here as well) and to get a commitment from the Board to revise the RAA including more consumer-protection-oriented clauses. Thanks to some Board members who shared this view, we had a specific resolution that binds ICANN's CEO to come up with a process for that. This, IMHO, is a very hot issue in which the NA ALSes should play a major role. There are other important ones as well, such as Whois or "domain tasting", and Alan might have others from the GNSO. Feel free to bug me, Jacqueline or your ALAC representatives to ensure that you are in the loop on policy matters, if for any reason (time constraints, usually - we are all volunteers with other daytime jobs) we fail to solicit input.

MEANWHILE... we haven't made the EXISTING structure work -- yet people are talking about creating additional, non-geographic RALOs? Does anyone else here understand how absolutely insane this appears to those without the historical baggage?

...but also to many of those with the historical baggage :-) IMHO, without all this resistence, we could have had RALOs in place two years ago, and perhaps we'd already have voting Board representatives by now. Regards, [now back to lurk mode] -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------