Evan, My comment wasn't intended to be helpful. I have watched this process over the course of many years during which time Civil Society arose as a severe critic of ICANN in Internet Governance matters. Their "contribution" to the process (what ICANN described as its single-largest distraction) resulted in a massive backlash that occasioned the loss of all At-Large directors, and the closure of ICANN's representative DNSO General Assembly. I have no use for Civil Society players that cannot or will not contribute to discussions and policy-formulation activities relating to the Domain Name System. If the intent of most parties on this list is to do nothing more than pursue Internet Governance issues, then their home should not be here, but rather in the WSIS talk-shop. You seem to wonder what's the harm in setting up this organization... let's be very clear on this point: the harm lies in legitimizing a process that serves to forever disenfranchise the At-Large community, a process that denies board-level representation to our community that had been promised at the outset representation on half of the ICANN Board. As for the value of localization -- show me one single DNS issue that would not be better served by the global approach taken every one of ICANN's constituencies. We don't have a Business Constituency or Non-Commercial Constituency that needs to be divided into five separate regional groups in order to be effective. This At-Large construct that you are pursuing has been an ill-conceived idea since day one and has met ongoing opposition at every turn from the real at-large community. It's now been four years since this plan was foisted upon us, and not one single ALS (there are 66 now) has offered a single comment on any DNS-related issue in all that time. The results speak for themselves. --- Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote:
Danny Younger wrote:
Frankly, I haven't seen you or your organizations offering any written advise on any topic whatsoever.
In spite of all these non-contributions, you seem to be gung-ho to set up this organization. Why?
This isn't helpful.
Lack of participation in the past should not serve as an obstacle to participation in the present or future, especially since part of this debate is about localization -- allowance for community consultation in local language -- that may provide better input in the long run.
The whole point of the RALO level of structure/bureaucracy, as I understand it, is to allow at large groups to work locally and aggregate grassroots-level points of view before getting to the top level. If that's the case then there is indeed a rationale behind designing the forum properly _before_ a coherent statement can come out of it.
In any case, this is a low-risk effort. The worst that can happen is that a RALO is created in the way Robert and Luc and others want, and nothing happens after that. THEN you can complain about non-action. But for now, arguing that a forum shouldn't be created because its proponents because haven't yet made policy conclusions seems a bit backwards to me.
Personally, I believe that RALOs should make every effort to internally work in whatever languages are practical to work with (while still enabling proper debate), but that the interface to ICANN still needs to be in English only.
Evan Leibovitch Executive Director CLUE - The Canadian Association for Open Source www.cluecan.ca
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