[ALAC] "official" liaisons (was Re: Draft statement on travel funding...)

[Evan Leibovitch]

Sébastien Bachollet wrote:
> My only concern is with the liaisons.
> ALAC have 2 official ones' but also some "no-official ones'"
> We need to work on "officialising" like ccNSO, IDN, NCSG/NCUC... and hopefully one day GAC..
This is not ICANN's problem but ALAC's.

Most ALAC members are not so overloaded that they are prevented from
also being liaisons; Indeed, requiring liaisons that are also voting
members of ALAC would strike me as a Good Thing. The easiest way to make
a liaison "official" is to choose that person from amongst existing ALAC
members.

Arguably, *every* member of ALAC should be required to provide specific
liaision duty of one form or another -- either as one of the external
ones Sébastien identifies above, or as a sub-committee chair (which is
effectively an internal liaision). Doing so gives ALAC members specific
responsibility and greater issues awareness (since it comes first-hand),
while reducing the load on the committee-of-the-whole.

Asking ICANN to fund liaisions who are not ALAC members is a convenient
attempt to maximize the number of At-Large participants at ICANN
meetings; however I do not consider it a responsible use of limited
resources, especially if that funding can applied elsewhere within
At-Large (such as outreach activities).

Having "unofficial" liaisons is problematic for the same reason as
having an executive committee. They are two different solutions of
expediency, both designed to cover up the same deficiency at the core of
ALAC.

Can we please directly address the problem -- under-tasked,
under-performing, ALAC members -- rather than just treating symptoms
with costly and/or un-transparent superficial fixes?

- Evan