Hi Roberto, Greetings from the IGF meeting. Thanks for your reply to my 11 August message, sorry I couldn't respond earlier, travel etc... Just a couple points in response: On Sep 10, 2009, at 11:24 PM, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
Hi, Bill.
Sorry for not having answered before, but these last weeks have been quite busy, with Board Review, GNSO improvement, SIC and Board meetings, and several odds and ends. Incidentally, in all this activity there is something that has been of direct interest to you, as part of ALAC, which is that the Board Review WG and the SIC recommended to the Board the replacement of the non-voting ALAC Liaison with a voting Director, and the Board ruled accordingly. Sure, the starting point from the ALAC Review WG was 2 voting Directors, but considering the substantial opposition to have ALAC voting Directors I believe it can be considered a first step in the good direction.
Sure
Now I have some time while on a looooong flight to LA, and will therefore try to briefly comment.
On the ALAC Chair statement, I maintain my "no comment" position, I am on the receiving end of the comments and not in a position to enter a debate about them. To your question on whether it was understood that it was her personal position, and not ALAC's position, may I confirm that the answer is "Yes" (with the caveat that in all situations you might have somebody who has misunderstood or who was distracted).
Understood and easy to anticipate, given the way this was characterized.
On the comments about the NCSG Charter, it was understood that all NCUC members who have commented endorsed the NCUC proposal (which, incidentally, is something that I would have expected anyway). The comments that were not supportive came from other quarters (which, again, is no surprise).
Right, but as we both want to avoid misunderstandings, for the record it's worth recalling that the "not supportive" comments came from just a couple people, while the supportive comments came from a significant range of non-NCUC individuals and orgs. Rather asymmetric situation.
Now, to what I consider the most important points, or at least the ones where we do have a disagreement, let me concentrate on the "amend the charter" vs. "reject the charter" issue. You wrote:
Second, and at the risk of being a bit obvious, if you did not receive sufficient commentary on the implementation of the SIC's charter, this may be because all of NCUC (save CP80) and the other civil society stakeholders who've spoken (save the three people from ALAC) have supported the NCUC version and hence opposed the sort of narrowly constituency-centric model embodied in the SIC charter. You knew that going in, it was made abundantly clear in the April public comment period and elsewhere. So I don't understand why you would have been expecting guidance on the implementation of a charter we do not want to see implemented.
Because of what I have told you in my previous message, i.e. that we had meetings in Sydney with the NCUC in which after long discussions we agreed on a course of action that would be to accept the Charter, as it was doubling the representation of the global non commercial community anyway, and to come to an agreement on the names of the additional three councillors. I would have expected an agreement between a delegation of the NCUC, led by its Chair, and a delegation of the SIC, led by its Chair, to be considered binding.
In the meanwhile you've had bilateral communications with Robin on this point so I don't need to go into detail. I wasn't in Sydney, but we've opposed the SIC/staff charter before, during, and after the meeting. However, when it became clear there was little hope that the board would reject it, we simply asked that the board work with noncommercial users over the next year to create a permanent charter everyone can live with. In addition, my understanding was that there'd been agreement in Sydney that NCUC would accept the board's appointment of the 3 new counselors if there was close collaboration and serious consideration given to the names we provided. So to my knowledge we've been consistent in the representation of our views and the deal was as described. If there are divergent understandings of the deal then obviously there's been some miscommunication that those who were involved hopefully will work through.
Having worked for several years in the Trade Unions, in different countries, I have a model in mind that when a negotiation is done, and an agreement reached, the negotiators go back to their constituencies, explain it, and seek for endorsement.
I think that's what we have in mind as well. The problem seems to concern the parties' respective understandings of the deal, not anyone's commitment to proceed as agreed.
Which is what I did, explaining the situation to the Board and seeking a decision by which we would have dismissed the petitions from [some quarters of the] CSG to maintain the status quo of 3 NCSG councillors only, and endorsed the 3+3 NCSG model.
Talk about not respecting a deal...said petitions are entirely inconsistent with prior hard fought agreements and shouldn't have been treated as worthy of consideration in the first place, much less as a sword dangling over our head that required us to embrace a charter imposed over our objections. The linkage being drawn here seems quite inappropriate.
And this is what I would have expected to happen on the other side as well. In the Trade Unions model that I know, and in any negotiation model that I am familiar with, if the negotiatior is unable to get his/her constituency's endorsement on the agreement, he/she resigns.
Happily, not an operative consideration in this case, as NCUC members support the deal as we understand it.
BTW we did provide input on implementation of the CSG charter, not that it mattered either.
Quite the contrary, as the famous paragraph 4.2 in the CSG Charter was deleted following the comment from Robin Gross.
Yes, that bit was an improvement.
Again, in general, we have provided input on such items with respect to the charter text we support, not the one we do not want forced upon us. On the specific matter of the three board appointments to the council (is this what you mean by jointly decided in Sydney?), after much discussion Robin sent you three names on 15 July and asked for guidance how to proceed with these. Are you saying we lose the chance to influence this, and if so how? Sorry, I'm missing some info here.
What is astonishing to me is that the NCUC goes from making an agreement, to shooting that agreement with a comment campaign
Do you mean the public comment period, which was prior to the meeting, or rather statements made afterward saying we don't like the charter (but will live with it for a year pending a collaborative redesign)?
and then goes back to the agreement, but picking only one clause not the totality of it. When there is a negotiation, there is a tradeoff, if one of the parties then goes back after the fact and only picks the part that it considers favourable complaining about the rest, it appears as an unreliable partner. And this is exactly what has happened.
Again, this is not the impression one would draw from the communications I've been privy to.
Please feel free to forward to NCUC, since I see they are in copy of your message, as I do not have posting rights to that list.
Done. But I'd still love to get your views on the status and treatment of public comments solicited in keeping with ICANN's encouragement etc, per below. Thanks much, Bill
-----Original Message----- From: euro-discuss-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org [mailto:euro-discuss-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org] On Behalf Of William Drake Sent: Tuesday, 11 August 2009 11:14 To: Discussion for At-Large Europe Cc: 'Robert Hoggarth'; 'NCUC Members List' Subject: Re: [EURO-Discuss] [Fwd: Clarifications RegardingStaffSummary-Analysis of Stakeholder Group Charter Public Forum]
Hi Roberto
Forgot you're on the Euralo list, good to hear from you. We haven't had an opportunity for public discussions with board members on their NCSG charter decision, so I appreciate you taking the time.
On Aug 10, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
Bill, I don't want to get into this debate about fairness of staff reporting, as this is a formal issue that you might want to solve between ALAC and Staff without interference.
I can assure you I'd rather not be into the debate either. But I'm really puzzled how the ALAC leadership could have submitted such a misleading public comment without seeking community consensus, how the staff could have reported it in a way that was equally misleading, why neither seem inclined to correct the public record, and so on. I'd like to believe this will be righted without interference, but after some days have seen nothing that to suggest this will happen, so around we go, apparently digging into trenches. It's rather discouraging.
What I would like to comment on, is the substance of the
comments, and
specifically the one from Cheryl. As Chair of the SIC, I have attentively read all comments within a couple of days maximum from their posting. The SIC needed to take decisions on modifications of the language of the charters immediately after closure of the comment period, so I needed to have direct, first hand information. I therefore read Cheryl's comment far before Staff's summary, and it appeared clear to me that she was talking from a personal point of view. I can guarantee that the SIC never thought that ALAC had taken a position for one or the other model.
Good to know. Can you confirm that this applies to the rest of the board as well? I can't help wondering, since board processes are opaque, and some interactions with other members have raised questions as to how closely they were actually following all this. Personally, I couldn't be in Sydney, but in Mexico City I had discussions with some who had developed a strong take on the NCUC proposed charter but admitted to not having actually read it carefully. There have been other indications along the same lines, and obviously, if information is getting heavily filtered and decisions are made on the basis of perceptions rather than facts, that's an issue. In this connection, I note that the 30 July board report says you discussed "the opposition raised by some of the members of the current Non Commercial Users Constituency." Of course, it was not some members, it was all members who submitted comments, plus a good many external civil society orgs and individuals, including some that might be enticed into the NCSG if they could be persuaded that it's not a pointless time suck. If the board can approve a report on its conversations that gets wrong something this basic, a priori it seems reasonable to question whether all members took the time to become duly aware that the three ALAC members who submitted comments supporting the SIC text spoke for themselves and not a community-wide view.
Incidentally, since the SIC met in Sydney with NCUC and came to an agreement on the future steps, what we were looking forward in the comment period was not counting fans of one or the other
solution, but
comments on the implementation of the different charters. Unfortunately, this was addressed only by a small number of comments, but there were significant elements, like the observation by Robin Gross that paragraph 4.2 in the CSG had to be striken out, which we did.
This puzzles me, in two senses First, I had thought that a key function of a public comment period is to weigh the levels of support within stakeholder communities (both those active within ICANN and external allies and the relevant general public) on proposed decisions. This is certainly a consideration with some other entities that solicit public comments on pending decisions, e.g. US government agencies like NTIA or FCC, and I'd thought that it was integral to ICANN's claims to be a bottom-up, community driven operation. I'm not a lawyer and expert on ICANN's contractual relationships with NTIA, the workings of California law on public benefit corporations, or the deep deconstruction of the operative bylaws provisions, but I had assumed that the cumulative weight of public comments is pertinent to the notion of 'accountability to the community.' So when you refer to the exercise as just 'counting fans,' and when staff attributes the level of community input to a 'letter writing campaign' and appears to discount it on that basis (I understand there's also been oral commentary to that effect), it leaves me wondering whether it really is a relevant factor in board decisions. This goes not just to the specific decision in question, but to participation in ICANN processes more generally going forward. So if you could clarify whether and how the volume and thrust of public comments is taken into account, this would aid us in thinking about the charter decision and future participation alike.
Second, and at the risk of being a bit obvious, if you did not receive sufficient commentary on the implementation of the SIC's charter, this may be because all of NCUC (save CP80) and the other civil society stakeholders who've spoken (save the three people from ALAC) have supported the NCUC version and hence opposed the sort of narrowly constituency-centric model embodied in the SIC charter. You knew that going in, it was made abundantly clear in the April public comment period and elsewhere. So I don't understand why you would have been expecting guidance on the implementation of a charter we do not want to see implemented. BTW we did provide input on implementation of the CSG charter, not that it mattered either.
Personally, I think that some people lost a chance to express opinions, and influence decisions, on important aspects like modality of choice of councillors, interest groups or constituencies that should be represented, modification of the internal structure, and so on, to focus on a binary "Yes" or "No" for a matter that had been already jointly decided by NCUC and SIC in Sydney.
Again, in general, we have provided input on such items with respect to the charter text we support, not the one we do not want forced upon us. On the specific matter of the three board appointments to the council (is this what you mean by jointly decided in Sydney?), after much discussion Robin sent you three names on 15 July and asked for guidance how to proceed with these. Are you saying we lose the chance to influence this, and if so how? Sorry, I'm missing some info here.
Thanks much for your feedback,
Bill
-----Original Message----- From: euro-discuss-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org [mailto:euro-discuss-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org] On Behalf Of William Drake Sent: Monday, 10 August 2009 13:13 To: Nick Ashton-Hart Cc: Discussion for At-Large Europe; Robert Hoggarth; NCUC Members List Subject: Re: [EURO-Discuss] [Fwd: Clarifications Regarding StaffSummary-Analysis of Stakeholder Group Charter Public Forum]
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the reply. I don't want to go on beating a dead horse, but just for the record:
On Aug 10, 2009, at 12:06 PM, Nick Ashton-Hart wrote:
Dear Bill:
As you addressed the question in the first paragraph to me, I'm replying, but as I didn't compose the staff summary Rob is really the better person to say what was intended by the paragraph in question, so I've copied him in.
That said, I don't believe that Rob intended (or that
what he wrote
actually suggests) characterises everything she said as being from ALAC - in fact it is made quite clear that her comment is a compilation of the previously-expressed views of the ALAC, and not an Advisory.
Here's the language:
Finally, although the majority of comments were strongly in support of returning to the original NCUC Charter version, ALAC favored the SIC‟s NCSG Charter that, “best meets the aims of the new GNSO Model and the Boards criteria, which we support, and believe is (with the additional version changes as at July 19th ) being essentially met.” Continuing in this vein, ALAC noted, “Maturity and development of the new design GNSO and specifically the parity and viability of the User House will benefit greatly with the „fresh start‟ this Charter in our opinion provides and it should be noted that in it we can see that the opinions and views brought forward in our processes, activities and meetings on the matter have been recognised, heard and considered.” [p.10]
Two commenters did not concur with the majority view. ALAC said, “At each of the User House Meetings since Cairo the ALAC has advised a lack of support and various concerns about the NCUC developed NCSG Charter version.” [p. 11]
Whatever Rob intended, I think most people would read "ALAC favored the SIC's NCSG Charter" as meaning that ALAC favored the SIC's NCSG Charter, etc.
I would also note that whilst it is not mentioned, Alan's
statement to
the consultation period seems salutary in respect of understanding more clearly what the issues were with the previous comments made on previous drafts by the ALAC with respect to your third paragraph.
Alan's statement
http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-stakeholder-charters/msg00069.html
"reiterate[s] that these comments are consistent with formal statements made by the ALAC over the last year." I don't see a formally approved statement at http://www.atlarge.icann.org/correspondence . I do see in the previous comment period a message from Alan http://forum.icann.org/lists/sg-petitions-charters/msg00020.html that says "The following comment has the explicit support of a number of ALAC members, but has not yet been subjected to a formal ALAC vote. It does reflect the comments that have been made by ALAC members in recent months [checking the list record, about a handful]. The ALAC is divided on the support of the proposal submitted by Robin Gross of the NCUC. Some members feel that although there are some problems with the proposal, it generally addresses their concerns, and in particular, the de-linking of Council seats from Constituencies is a very good move in the right direction. Problems notwithstanding, the proposal should receive Board approval. Others feel that the issues still outstanding are sufficient to withhold Board support at this time."
It is not obvious how "ALAC favored the SIC's NCSG Charter" can be deemed "consistent with" the earlier "The ALAC is divided on the support of the proposal submitted by Robin Gross of the NCUC..." especially given the lack of discussion, much less consensus or a formal position, on the SIC's NCSG Charter. But no matter, we all understand where we are here.
Cheers,
Bill
I hope this is helpful; I'm sure Rob will reply on his own
behalf in
due course.
William Drake wrote:
Hi Nick
Thanks for this. Let me make sure I understand what Rob's
saying.
CLO's personal statement endorsing the SIC charter can properly be characterized by staff as an ALAC endorsement of the charter because a) the staff summary does not purport to address every specific argument (but simply to mischaracterize them when convenient?) and b) her message was prefaced by a disclaimer stating that she was presenting a synopsis of ALAC conversations from before the SIC charter was even produced. So ALAC did not actually have to have discussed the SIC charter, much less have reached consensus on it, in order for staff to characterize her position as ALAC's. Do I have that right?
Interesting parallel: I asked Rob in a GNSO council meeting, and reiterated in my submission to the public comment period, that statements made in support of the NCUC version by NCUC members and hundreds (counting the Internet Governance Caucus etc) of external supporters in the public comment period ending 15 April be taken into account in the summary of the PC ending 23 July. The reasons for doing so were straightforward: there was no reason to believe that the organizations and individuals that said they supported the NCUC model and therefore rejected the opposite model had changed their positions, so they should not be required to all mobilize and restate their stances a couple months later, in the summer travel season (although some did). The suggestion was not acted upon or even mentioned in the staff summary.
So: a synopsis of ALAC conversations during the previous PC period, in which it was concluded that there was no consensus in ALAC on the charters, can be cited as an ALAC endorsement of a version that was never discussed or agreed on. But a substantial number of comments from NCUC and its supporters during the same previous PC period that unambiguously supported the NCUC model and rejected the alternative did not merit mention. And in any event, civil society objections to the SIC charter in the July PC period should sort of be discounted because, the staff summary says, "well over half of the responses appeared to be a direct or indirect [fuzzy math?] result of a letter writing campaign initiated by Robin Gross." Outreach soliciting the public comments ICANN was soliciting renders those comments suspect, if it is done by NCUC.
Thank you for clarifying once again how ICANN's bottom-up, transparent, and accountable community processes work.
Best,
Bill
On Aug 7, 2009, at 7:48 PM, Nick Ashton-Hart wrote:
> Dear All: > > As a couple of queries have come in from Bill and Adam with > respect to the staff summary of the NCSG public comment period, > Rob has sent along the below. > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: Clarifications Regarding Staff Summary-Analysis of > Stakeholder Group Charter Public Forum > Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 08:50:47 -0700 > From: Robert Hoggarth <robert.hoggarth@icann.org> > To: Nick Ashton-Hart <Nick.Ashton-Hart@icann.org> > > > Dear Nick: > > I understand that there have been some recent discussion within > the At-Large community regarding the Staff Summary/Analysis (S/A) > of the submissions in the GNSO Stakeholder Group Charter Forum > that closed on 24 July.- http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/#stakeholder > - and particularly the reference the S/A document makes to the > comments submitted by ALAC Chair Cheryl Langdon-Orr. > > As the staff person responsible for that document, I wanted to > make sure that I cleared up any potential confusion in the > attribution assigned to Cheryl’s submission in the S/A. At > the > beginning of every S/A document we clearly include the caution to > the reader that: > > “This document is intended to broadly and comprehensively > summarize the comments of the various contributors to this forum > but not to address every specific argument or position stated by > any or all contributors. The Staff recommends that readers > interested in specific aspects of any of the summarized comments > or the full statements of others refer directly to the originally > posted contributions.” > > Further, with respect to the specific comments submitted by > Cheryl, I reproduced verbatim the disclaimer that she provided at > the top of her submission. Footnote one at the beginning of the S/ > A document reads: > > “[1] The Submission by Cheryl Langdon-Orr specifically noted the > following disclaimer, ‘This comment is intended to ensure that the > Board Structural Improvements Committee (SIC) is aware of and > takes into account in this current public comment period the > previous activities, views and opinions, including Advice to the > Board, and ratified Statements of the At-Large Advisory Committee > (ALAC) and the At-Large Community with specific reference to the > development of the new structure of the GNSO, its Council and the > Stakeholder Group model. This is not a formal or ratified > statement or comment per se but rather a synopsis of those > previously provided in various fora to date.’ For identification > purposes this document uses the ‘ALAC’ initials to refer to > the > submission.” > > If for any reason, Cheryl would like to clarify her comments or if > she thinks the initials I used to identify her comments were > inappropriate, please have her send me an email at robert.hoggarth@icann.org > and I will work with the web-admin and tech-support teams to re- > open the Forum record to insert any clarifications she might want > to make to her submission. > > Besr, > > Rob Hoggarth > > > > -- > -- > Regards, > > Nick Ashton-Hart > Director for At-Large > Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) > Tel: +33 (450) 42 81 83 > USA Tel: +1 (310) 301-8637 > Fax: : +41 (22) 594-85-44 > Mobile: (Switzerland): +41 79 595 5468 > email: nick.ashton-hart@icann.org > Win IM: ashtonhart@hotmail.com / AIM/iSight: nashtonhart@mac.com / > Skype: nashtonhart > Online Bio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtonhart
*********************************************************** William J. Drake Senior Associate Centre for International Governance Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva, Switzerland william.drake@graduateinstitute.ch www.graduateinstitute.ch/cig/drake.html ***********************************************************