Improvement of the win-win relationship between the Staff and the At-Large Community
In case you did not get this Email today, please find below the Email sent by the At-Large Staff Dear All: You will have received At-Large Staff¹s (Frederic Teboul¹s) recent email asking some questions of you as a member of the At-Large community and some of you have already replied. As there have been a few questions about the message, we would like to provide some additional information. Firstly, we want to emphasize that this effort is meant to be a collaborative process we are asking you to provide information so that we can combine your answers with others in the At-Large community and create a summary of the community¹s views on how its involvement in ICANN can be better supported. We will share the aggregated input with you, along with an analysis of the trends that we see, and our thoughts on how we might collectively Staff and community - respond to the Regional At-Large Organizations¹ needs to support greater involvement in ICANN. After community discussion and concurrence, an Action Plan will be publicly posted and implemented. To be clear, the questions you have been asked to respond to relate only to the At-Large community and its involvement in ICANN. To avoid any confusion, we are re-stating the questions below, and would appreciate receiving your thoughts. This exercise is part of Staff's ongoing effort to better serve the At-Large community. It is not related to the completely separate and independent ³ALAC Review² currently being conducted under the auspices of the Board as part of their process for reviewing all ICANN structures. We know you are all busy and that you volunteer for your At-Large group and ICANN in your spare time. On reflection, we therefore think the original deadline was overly ambitious. It would be a great help if we could get a good set of responses on or before the end of the Paris ICANN meeting (25th June). This will allow us to move on to the next steps in the process mentioned above in due course. That said, of course the kind of input we seek in this short questionnaire is always welcome we are always glad to hear your thoughts, concerns and ideas. For your convenience, below you will find a restated set of the same questions. 1. What issues being debated in ICANN do you believe are the most important to your RALO? 2. How can we help make the time you spend on ICANN issues as valuable and efficient to you as possible? 3. What challenges and opportunities do you see for your RALO and for At-Large more generally (in the context of ICANN work)? 4. How interaction between and within RALOs be increased? 5. What are the top three things you would like your RALO to achieve? 6. What are the top three things you believe ICANN Staff could do to help your RALO? Many thanks in advance for your time with these questions but also with ICANN! Regards, Nick Ashton-Hart, Matthias Langenegger, Frederic Teboul ICANN At-Large Staff email: staff@atlarge.icann.org
At 17:56 10/06/2008, At-Large Staff wrote:
For your convenience, below you will find a restated set of the same questions.
This answer is based upon the vision that ICANN is not necessary to the Internet on an Internet @large point of view, but necessary to some members of the Internet community. As such ICANN : 1) must undertake a transition towards a mission which is not yet well defined as enhanced cooperation has not been really discussed by the WSIS community. It is therefore likely that this mission will not be finalized before the end of JPA and IGF. 2) @large are probably probably going to be the toughest competition ICANN will meet in the coming years if it engages into a TLD marketing campaign, because the technical evolution is to a dillution of the DNS in terms of TLDs and semantic addressing. (This conforms to ICANN ICP-3 document ICANN should reread).
1. What issues being debated in ICANN do you believe are the most important to your RALO?
- which services ICANN can bring to the @large community in terms of network operations (escrow is an idea). - Mostly ICANN can help RALO meetings, and RALOs progressive autonomy from ICANN in order to become credible ICANN interfaces (RALO must take over an interest in practical operations ISOC has never taken). Otherwise it will be a grassroots @large deployment. These kinds of move are slow and call for adequate/credible tools/applications. I think we see them coming (ex. unbound).
2. How can we help make the time you spend on ICANN issues as valuable and efficient to you as possible?
- In listening and reporting to the BoD. @large are no value to ICANN if they are not accepted as field experts. What is certainly difficult is to assess the exact field of expertise of each of them (usage, PRs, operations, DNS, legal, political, future, connections, etc.). This kind of work calls for a great expertise in the Internet field, just to be able to understand the implications of what is reported. Example: ICANN should work out an agreement with IETF on a IETF/ICANN WG-@large able to interface @larges. Not so much to answer @larges, but to get commented/translated field inputs from @larges as lead users. Probably the same with the GAC.
3. What challenges and opportunities do you see for your RALO and for At-Large more generally (in the context of ICANN work)?
Getting ICANN to properly define a strategic objective which fits whith what Internet users might be interested in. The real risk is an ICANN split due to a disagreement between what ICANN proposes and what users really wait for.
4. How interaction between and within RALOs be increased?
f2f specialised meetings. Working/Reporting on a given topic. With external experts.
5. What are the top three things you would like your RALO to achieve?
- participate in creating the Euro-IGF - document a position on ICANN future and specific services to Europe - accredit france@large :-)
6. What are the top three things you believe ICANN Staff could do to help your RALO?
- explain why they opposed france@large - work on support of the RALO through working tools. Mailing lists (ICANN Staff should be explained about) are not sufficient. This is a community wide need ICANN should be associated with - organising the funding of network oriented Open Source projects. GPL is not oriented towards networking solutions. (cf. RFC 3869) jfc
participants (2)
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At-Large Staff -
JFC Morfin