On 19/06/2013 17:49, Garth Bruen wrote:
No one's voice is ICANN's policy discussion is limited, this concerns the necessary limiting personal comments which detract from the value of our discussion.
+1 Garth. The ALAC Rules of Procedure specifically prohibit the use of At-Large lists for ad-hominem allegations: Rule 22.11 Postings that are, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person, In addition, ICANN Bylaws on conduct also allude to standards of behaviour that are expected of participants. It would be counter-productive to say that removal of ad-hominem offensive postings limits someone's voice in ICANN Activities. Quite the contrary, inflammatory postings targeted at individuals break the harmony of the discussions and deter good participants from being actively involved, for fear of reprisal. All At-Large lists are archived and the archives are crawled by Internet search engines - occasionally, libellous statements end up in a search engine search - something that (potential) employers, clients, family and friends can find. I am sad that occasionally someone has to be suspended from a mailing list, especially if that person has made, and continues to make some very valuable contributions, and I therefore hope that this will serve as a lesson and we can return to constructive dialogue. On the matter of ALSes, work is under way in the community regarding metrics for all parts of At-Large, from the ALSes all the way up to RALO leadership, ALAC members, the ALAC Chair and to the Board member selected by the At-Large community. This is a complex challenge and will take time to design, discuss and implement. It is not by naming and shaming one ALS at a time that we can achieve a better and more active At-Large Community, quite contrary. It is through the design of reliable feedback and evaluation processes (I prefer not to use the bastardization of this concept named Return on Investment - ROI) which include safeguards for the avoidance of abuse of the system to repress free contribution and turn the system overly top-down, that we can address these issues. The challenge comes from the fact that we are constantly going into what is new territory for many of us. So help from people who have experienced an effective method for bottom-up organisational enhancement will be very welcome when the work gets under way in each RALO and in the ALAC Metrics working group. Everyone's bandwidth is limited. We are all volunteers. With your collective help, we can hopefully get there faster. Kindest regards, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond ALAC Chair