[At-Large] ICANN Board Nomination
Karl Auerbach
karl at cavebear.com
Mon Aug 30 22:18:00 UTC 2010
On 08/30/2010 02:25 PM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:
> Le 30/08/2010 22:54, Karl Auerbach a écrit :
>> Put the promised 50%+ of ICANN's board seats up for public election from
>> slates of candidates who need pass no insider nomination process and I
>> guarantee you that the public participation in ICANN would go up by many
>> orders of decimal magnitude.
>>
>
> Over 50% of the Board seats are selected by NOMCOM. Anyone can apply.
> Add the At Large Director seat, and whilst it's not a direct public
> election either, it looks to me like a process that cannot be captured
> as easily as direct elections (which is what led to the reform in the
> first place).
The "nominating committee" - It ought to have its name corrected because
it "appoints" rather than "nominates".
That body, although it has made nice selections (and I use the word
"nice" with all of its English ambiguous nuance), that committee has
essentially been like one of those barrels that one uses to polish
stones - neither stone nor person comes out with any edge or sharpness.
Like most such committees the choices are compromises made by people who
obtained their seats on the committee largely because they are
status-quo oriented in the first place - thus a tendency for like to
"nominate" like.
The community of internet users, like most bodies of natural people,
ought to have the power to chose who it wishes, even if those people are
of the nature that would cause a nominating committee to choke.
ICANN's system - including the nominating committee - was designed with
the specific intent of keeping out the noisy riff-raff who might
question the status quo - people like me.
And, going back the the prior point - the reason why people are staying
out of ICANN and the ALAC in droves is precisely because of the
isolation between those people and ICANN that results from the
intervention of the "nominating" committee and the ALAC+RALO+ALS system.
Sleeping Beauty's prince had a better chance to get through that thicket
of thorns than internet users have to exercise their will through the
multilayer armor of ICANN's ALAC+RALO+ALS.
Give the community of internet users a "stake" and power to have effect
within ICANN comparable to that of Verisign or PIR or the trademark
community and people would participate just as they did in the hundreds
of thousands in year 2000.
ICANN's has legal existence explicitly to serve the public interest. It
is sad that such a thick firewall has been erected by ICANN against that
public from having any but a highly filtered and derivative role.
Many, perhaps most, people will not step off the sidewalk to pick up a
penny in the gutter - they perceive the value to be too small to be
worth getting their hands and clothes dirty. The same equation - too
little value to justify even a small risk - that is what is keeping
internet users out of ICANN.
--karl--
More information about the At-Large
mailing list