Danny,
If Communautique (as an org of orgs) will not meet the ALS criteria per the ICANN bylaws, then why leave them out in the cold? It would certainly be better to suggest to them that they can possibly find a home in the NCUC.
Actually, you are wrong. Communautique has been certified as ALS, with 7 YES and 2 NO out of the 9 valid votes. Therefore, I am very sorry for you, but they are not out in the cold, but well inside the to-be-formed NA RALO. Besides, the spirit of the ICANN Bylaws is to avoid that fancy organizations, that have nothing to do with internet user representation, get certified and capture the RALOs. With the experience of time, we have seen that there are several "umbrella organizations", that have as members organizations that are directly governed by individuals. This is fairly common in particular in Europe, where there is one single European umbrella, that federates the national organizations. There has been discussion going on in order to align the language of the Bylaws to the spirit of the ALAC since the meeting in Kuala Lumpur. The decision has been to gather more experience, let the RALO be formed, and then evaluate the situation, possibly in conjunction with the ALAC review (which, incidentally, will take place in a not too distant future).
With regard to "nothing prevents both things to happen at the same time", that may not be true. In fact, I am currently in discussions with Milton Mueller over this issue as the NCUC Charter deems ineligible those organizations that provide services under MoU with ICANN.
This is a choice of NCUC, that is legitimate, but that will in the end only hurt NCUC, which, incidentally, has been already enough under fire by the GNSO Review run by LSE because of its lack of representativity. But again, looking at things going back to first principles, not applying narrow reading of the language, what this provision wanted to avoid was the fact that organizations were created for the purpose of providing services to ICANN, and could be used to steer the decision making process. This is not at all the case of the ALSes, who are not, in strict terms, providing a service to ICANN, but have an agreement for participation in the policy making process. I think that the NCUC would be much better off if it tried to do some outreach and recruitment of new members, even if this could put at a risk the current distribution, and try to grow rather than to be ill-advised in trying to prevent the other parts of ICANN to grow. But this is outside the scope of this mailing list. Cheers, Roberto