Thompson, Darlene wrote:

Well, you had me agreeing with most everything you said right up until that last paragraph. Maybe there is something we can do that would be a little less drastic?

IMO the ALAC is still poisoned by having one-third of its VOTING members not be responsible to the community. You don't see one third of other constituencies having ICANN NomComm appointees parachuted in. This silliness is compounded by the fact that these appointees, in turn, get one third of the vote to select ALAC' NomComm members. The problem is certainly not with the individuals -- folks like Alan and Vanda have been absolutely critical to the recent maturing of ALAC -- but they belong in roles of senior advisors rather than leadership. The issue is not one of individual skill as much as it is the importing of ICANN bureaucratic culture into At-Large. We require a very different, community-centric cultural model -- one that so far has been totally foreign within ICANN. That requires a bottom-up approach that can only work if ALAC is 100% responsible to its community. The ICANN-bred elitism of ALAC is fading, though at an unacceptably glacial speed. At one point Robert was serving as the consciousness of ALAC to keep its policy discussions as open as possible, but for whatever reasons he's gone quiet lately. There was absolutely no excuse for the most recent GNSO-related discussions to happen on the ALAC internal list, which is why I started the thread here at na-discuss. And I'm told that other RALOs were able to discuss the recent joint statement because their RALO reps engaged them sooner. Given that some of the RALO reps on the joint statement were not RALO appointees and thus not responsible to their regions, I fault ALAC and support staff for not making accommodations to allow all regions to be equally engaged. I do not at all share Danny's eagerness to cede from the global at-large infrastructure. It merely makes us look like whiners and impedes the general advancement of At-Large policy. We need to work from within. My anger -- and the statement I drafted on top of Danny's -- were in response to a lack of time to respond, and were done as a last resort given a time frame of hours. But Beau's reply, in opposition to our opposition, :-) made all the sense in the world. I've asked Nick and Cheryl to extend the comment period by one week, giving us time to engage rather than oppose. In future we need to push ALAC -- and ensure that _it_ pushes as appropriate -- for the appropriate comment periods and mechanisms necessary to engage the community culture. This is doable, but it requires the continuation of an ongoing -- and sometimes painful -- thought-shift at the ALAC level. I would really appreciate if some NARALO members step forward to help figure out how to bring our concerns into the existing ALAC documents, even if the result indicates a diversity of views rather than a single consensus. Frankly, now that I've heard Alan's position I think we're not really far apart in views -- let's see how much common ground we really do have and how much our input can improve the ALAC position rather than undermine it. (At very least, I like the GNSO move to change its NomComm people from voting reps to non-voting advisors -- a step we should all be advocating with the ALAC reviewers, IMO.) That's it for now. My head hurts. - Evan