Re: [lac-discuss-en] [ALAC] Some thoughts on ALS Criteria & Expectations Taskforce
At 08/08/2015 06:36 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
On 8 August 2015 at 09:37, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <<mailto:ocl@gih.com>ocl@gih.com> wrote:
3. The latter ones come to meetings, perhaps attend some meetings, enjoy the local offerings, and go home and forget about us until the next trip. THOSE are the ones that I have a real problem with.
And unfortunately whenever the time comes for having face to face meetings, we treat those people the same way as we treat the people who genuinely want to get involved.
So long as At-Large leadership is selected bottom-up by a reasonably democratic process, it will not always include the "hardest workers". Politics of various sorts can happen in any region, and it is not a stretch to say that "number of hours spent on ICANN in the past" can often be ârended insignificant in an election campaign next to social skills, global geopolitics or other factors.
Somebody may be elected based on nothing more than a promise to vote a certain way on ALAC statements or to advance a very specific agenda on a narrow range of issues. How do you confront that without threatening the democratic process?
The easy answer is to ask ICANN for more travel spots as Olivier suggests, so that (as one possible example) working group chairs (which are usually in their posts by merit rather than politics because of the workload). Well, that's an easy answer for us -- to the rest of ICANN's constituencies, most of which already take At-Large to be a charity case, this will be a tough sell.
Although ALAC Members and RALO Leaders may well fall into all categories, those tahat fall into category 3 on a regular basis should be dealt with directly, and the others we have little choice but to accept. At least for their first term. Of deeper concern and the ones I focused on when answering were those for whom we support as ALS representatives.
(Then again, ICANN could if it chooses help At-Large look for outside participation sponsorship -- yet it is unwilling, or unable, to do so.)
âAnyway... back when I was more deeply involved in At-Large, I resisted and even belittled the various attempts to push, prod, measure and âsilo us. Most of these efforts deserve continuing ridicule, for they remain largely navel-gazing exercises which are more effective at distraction and time-burning than anything else.
IMO, there are three overarching needs of At-Large: * How do we make ICANN and its dilemmas more accessible to the global public? * How can we best determine what is important to that public? * How can we best advance those priorities within ICANN without being marginalized?
I agree. But for better or worse, we either need to make the ALS/RALO structure work, or reduce its visibility and cost. As it is, it is both expensive (not necessarily in money, but in time and focus) and opens us up to strong (and at times valid) criticism
âEverything we do must serve one of those needsâ. This means frankly answering:
Who needs to do what at F2F meetings? (Maybe some of our most important travel is NOT to ICANN meetings?)
How are we engaging with the public outside ICANN? (If CROPP is as good as it gets let's not even bother)
What staff support do we need in research and communications? (Can we get stats and opinion polls to back our policy actions?)
How do we mobilize pubic opinion? (First, we get the public to care)
Wringing our collective hands over how to deal with laggards and tourists -- who happen to be popular enough to get elected -- pre-occupied ALAC before I got involved, and it continues to suck energy out of addressing the real reason the At-Large community even exists.
âMeanwhile, the other parts of ICANN that prefer At-Large weak and ineffectual, delight in our tail-chasing. â - Evan
On 9 August 2015 at 03:21, Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote:
Although ALAC Members and RALO Leaders may well fall into all categories, those tahat fall into category 3 on a regular basis should be dealt with directly, and the others we have little choice but to accept. At least for their first term.
I stand by my point. Over the years I have been aware of leadership that, despite widespread awareness of minimal participation, continue to be re-elected because of other factors. How much time do we spend collecting data for report cards and pondering how to punish, time that could be better spent on the massive task of making ICANN accessible to the global public? Not only do we lose person-hours directly from non-productive leadership, we doubly lose by churning so much volunteer energy (from the "workers") identifying and designing punishments for them. Futile punishments.
Of deeper concern and the ones I focused on when answering were those for whom we support as ALS representatives.
So far that support has been limited attendance at Summits, either global or regional. (And those events tend to be heavily surrounded by surveys, reports, attendance sheets, mandatory debriefs and other measures.) Otherwise, how do we support ALS reps? They get to vote for their RALO and ALAC reps, they are subscribed to mailing lists and -- very, very occasionally -- explicitly solicited for their informed opinions on specific At-Large policy directions. (And by policy directions I don't mean the recurring knee-jerk reactions to whatever is on this week's public comment calendar.) If you're going to respond that ALS-leadership participation in Summits constitutes "support" to ALSs, you fall into the trap that Carlton so well identified. *Bringing ALS leaders to ICANN is a service to ICANN, not to the ALS leaders.* The "perk" of travel is more than offset by the treatment of At-Large volunteers as a cost centre, and ICANN's unwillingness to make its working accessible in plain language once they arrive to participate. for better or worse, we either need to make the ALS/RALO structure work, or
reduce its visibility and cost. As it is, it is both expensive (not necessarily in money, but in time and focus) and opens us up to strong (and at times valid) criticism
This fear of criticism has forever been a source of self-censorship, timidity and eventually the non-factor that ALAC has actually played in ICANN policy decisions. We need look no further than ICANN's treatment of the PIC issue, over which ALAC made as much noise and attention as it possibly could, to witness how little was actually achieved in changing ICANN's direction. So... how much does anyone else fear OUR criticism? This fear also prevents us from true big-picture thinking of how to bet serve our mandate. Before we agonize over how to tinker with the org chart, let's be clear of the objectives. The radical measures that would be necessary to truly re-envision the ALS/RALO scheme, to make ICANN more receptive to the need of end-users, appears beyond scope of the review. (Arguably, it's also a decade too late, so much damage has already been done, I truly question whether the damage is reversible.) It doesn't help that the reviewers tend to be clueless and/or biased in favour of serving ICANN's need to keep us marginalized. "If we rock the boat too hard we will lose <something>" .... the specific <something> has changed over the years, but this internalized fear of criticism has become a constant, a core cause of ALAC's self-imposed ceiling of influence. - Evan
participants (2)
-
Alan Greenberg -
Evan Leibovitch