[ALAC] [At-Large] "placeholder" reps not placeholders?

[William Drake]

Hi Dominik

On Oct 21, 2009, at 1:26 AM, Dominik Filipp wrote:

> Bill,
>
> I see some points be more clarified for those not sitting inside  
> ICANN. If I understand well, the NCUC viewpoint presented by you is  
> that the NCUC in the new charter supports democratic election of  
> councilor seats in the GNSO council and those elected councilors  
> will have obviously voting right exactly as they have it now (the  
> NCUC has three seats). The difference between NCUC and some At-Large  
> presented positions is only in a way how the councilors will be  
> nominated or elected, democratically or hard wired. In other words,  
> there is no doubt or discussion but a general consensus between the  
> NCUC and At-Large on the basic fact that NCSG constituency should  
> have voting councilor seats in the GNSO council in any way.
> Am I right?

Yes, absolutely.

As I said yesterday in response to Roberto,

> Agreed.  As far as I can tell, everyone sees the 'powers' fairly  
> similarly, except that NCUC thinks council seats should be filled by  
> elections, SIC thinks the EC should just hash out the allocation of  
> seats (which to us sounds like a recipe for trench warfare), and  
> some in ALAC feel there should be hard wiring.  Hopefully we can  
> have a focused discussion on the relative merits of these approaches  
> and the trajectories/scenarios they may point to in order to move  
> this to another level.

That's it.  We think hard wiring will result in fragmentation within  
self-regarding silos, with people treating the NCSG as a mere shell  
within which they can pursue their stand alone agendas rather than  
feeling an incentive to work with the broader civil society  
community.  And once you get to more than six constituencies, you'd  
have to start monkeying around with formula for division of the  
spoils.  It is often the case that noncommercial interests and  
viewpoints are in a distinct minority in the council as they are in  
ICANN more generally, so encouraging fragmentation is just a recipe  
for staying powerless, in my view.  And as I've said, democratic  
elections would probably yield the same sort of distribution of  
council seats anyway, unless a constituency is constitutionally  
screwed up (e.g. if the consumer group is populated by groups with  
corporate members who have entirely different agendas) or just a  
vehicle for a few non-geographically diverse folks, or the candidate  
is personally impossible to work with, etc.  I can't see CS people who  
work on say privacy not supporting a good candidate from a solid  
constituency who's advocating positions that are broadly appealing to  
other CS people.  In other civil society networks I participate in--- 
the iG caucus in the IGF, the CSISAC in OECD, etc---mutual support and  
broadly shared visions have been more than sufficient to bind people  
together and produce elections to leadership positions that were non- 
divisive (without every faction demanding "it's" rep, although here  
that'd be more of a priority I guess).  I can't see any reason the  
same level of trust and collaboration couldn't prevail in NCSG, other  
than the generally dysfunctional, trust-free culture that seems to  
pervade in ICANN.  And the SIC's model is even worse, they have the  
executive committee somehow just "working it out" amongst itself,  
which will just transfer the fragmentation and competition into a more  
intensive and divisive process.

Whatever one's perspective on the options is, it ought to be the case  
that we can have a reasoned, adult conversation about how each would  
likely play out, and it's costs and benefits.  We did that internally  
in NCUC and came to the view that elections were the best way  
forward.  But we've not had the opportunity for a similar conversation  
with the board/SIC, or with ALAC for that matter. Hopefully we're  
about to do that with the former now, but re: the latter, there's no  
NCUC-ALAC meeting scheduled, so I guess it's a matter of talking over  
beers.  Whether that'll be sufficient I don't know, but it's all we  
can manage, I guess.

And BTW, as a member of the council, can I just add that it's slightly  
puzzling to me that people should be fighting over this particular  
"prize."   If done properly, it's a ton of work, much of it on  
procedural arcana (my bandwidth has unfortunately been largely  
absorbed with restructuring hijinks, looking forward to getting past  
that eventually and having more to work on the substantive policy  
issues).  But I guess ICANN should be happy that folks are just dying  
to get in there and do it...

Bill