[ALAC] Board request for Community Input and Advice

[Alan Greenberg]

At 11/10/2012 05:46 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>On 11 October 2012 16:17, Alan Greenberg 
><<mailto:alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca>alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca> wrote:
>The deadline for submitting a comment is 25 Oct. If there is little 
>interest in the ALAC for submitting such a comment, I am happy to do 
>it under my own name as well as anyone else who supports it. But if 
>there is agreement with the issues raised, it certainly would have 
>more impact coming from the ALAC.
>I am speaking at a public panel on this subject on Monday. At this 
>point, it is solely on my own behalf, but I welcome input from 
>others on the ALAC as to what should be said.
>
>
>I don't think that the response you received was insubstantial.
>
>It is reasonable -- especially for ALAC -- to respond to a request 
>by advising that its question is wrong or inappropriate.
>
>The problem is not with the methods by which the community sends 
>comments to the Board, but rather how (and how transparently) the 
>Board accepts and deals with that input.
>
>- Evan

They were particularly asking about melded input from multiple 
groups, and the evidence is that the methodology for that (to the 
limited extent that it exists) is broken. If only because the 
positions taken are, at times, close to polar opposites. And even 
from a single group, the onus is on that group to condense the input 
to the extent that it is often written in code - code that is perhaps 
not understood by many of the recipients. I guess that could be 
referred to as how they deal with it, but I think there is a 
philosophical question that is much more important. Are we supposed 
to be on the same team as the Board, or not.

Regarding whether it is reasonable for the ALAC to comment. If I 
didn't think so, I would not have spent several hours composing it on 
my last day before travel!  ;-)

Alan