If face to face meetings are not of use or import in these situations, by that logic I dont see why any ICANN or ICANN related meeting should be face to face.
ICANN, more than any other organization I have ever tried to deal with, works primarily via informal contacts with the people who are in a position of authority, the ICANN board and the permanent staff. The point of having a meeting is to schmooze with those people, and to a lesser extent with the government officials to whom the board has to pay attention, and with the paid formal or informal lobbyists who are better at schmoozing them than we are. The only time the ALAC meets is in conjunction with an ICANN meeting, because there'd be no point otherwise. There is doubly no point in a standalone NARALO meeting. If people are going to spend all that time and money, the only sensible time and place to do so is when ICANN is meeting in Puerto Rico later this year, when you can have a chance to get to know the people who matter.
Face to Face meeting is critical at this juncture.
To do what? As several people including me have said more than once, a RALO isn't going to make anything happen that isn't going to happen anyway. If you think it's important to tell people about ICANN, you should do so now, and not use the lack of a RALO as an excuse. But see the rest of this message first.
I really dont think that ICANN/ICANN-ALAC mechanism or tools not being in place excuses the lack of such activity. Any number of the existing parties could have reached out for us (or the group here before some of our arrival) to start working together sooner towards our common mssion, let alone the actual formation of the RALO.
Right. Why do you think that hasn't happened? Except for Nick and Jacob, both of whom only started working at ICANN recently, we're all unpaid volunteers with day jobs doing something else. Who do you think should have been doing this work? Why? The reality is that most of what ICANN does is irrelevant to the vast majority of Internet users. My .aero domain is swell, but I don't think the 99% of Internet users who have never heard of .aero are any worse off for it. There's a few things that matter, personal privacy issues like WHOIS policy (for better or worse, as previously argued here), and perhaps .XXX if you think it will make porn more or less available and you think that's important. Other than that, it's just arcana. I happen to think that the new ICANN-Verisign agreement that lets them raise the price of .COM domains every year is bad policy due to the effect it has on other Internet businesses, but for at-large users, it's a non-event. The vast majority will never register a domain; for the small minority that do, it'll mean they pay $11/yr rather than $10/yr. BFD. There are all sorts of other issues related to the Internet, from spam and phishing to broadband network neutrality to access for people in poor countries (of which the NA region has none, only relatively poor parts of rich countries.) But you know what? That's not what ICANN does, nor what a RALO does. Please, go read the first section of the ICANN bylaws, the part that starts MISSION, and then tell us how relevant that mission is to your members and other Internet users. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.