[At-Large] [BMSPC-2020] Board seat 15 selection

Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond ocl at gih.com
Mon Nov 18 16:01:56 UTC 2019


Dear Wolfgang,

thank you for finally writing this history! I have been waiting for this
day for 10 years!
Kindest regards,

Olivier

On 17/11/2019 15:44, Wolfgang Kleinwächter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> here is the full background story:
>
> 1. The original bylaws (1998) did reserve 9 voting seats for an
> undefined "At Large Membership". 9 other voting seats were reserved
> for three SOs (DNSO, ASO, PSO). Ine seat for the CEO. There was a
> "placeholder" in the bylaws because nobody knew, what "At Large" is.
> An "Membership Advisory Committee" (MAC) was formed in Singapore
> during the 1st ICANN meeting in February 1999 (with the Berkman
> Center/Jonathan Zittrain as the academic back up). The MAC had a
> meeting during the 2nd ICANN in Berlin, July 1999. It concluded to
> identify the At Large voting directors via elections in the year 2000.
> The whole project was seen as a pilot project for "cyberdemocracy" and
> a bigger role of civil society on Internet policy making. The
> elections were described as an "experiment". They were organized with
> the help of a "Membership Implementation Task Force" (MITF). As a
> first step, the plan was to elect five directors from the five ICANN
> regions. The election was an exciting but also irritating experience.
> It worked and the community (around 200 000 voters) elected five
> directors which took their seat at the 2000 Annual Meeting in LA.
>
> 2. The elections produced a lot of questions. To answer those
> questions, ICANN etsbalished an "At Large Study Group" (ALG), chaired
> by the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt. The recommendations
> of the Bildt-Committee were presented at the ICANN meeting in
> Montevideo, September 2001. The main receommendation was to allow only
> "domainname holder" to participate in the election to avoid a misuse
> and to have a higher level of "representation" by stakeholders.
> Nevertheless, the Bildt-Proposal produced a wave of criticism by civil
> society. Such an approach would have excluded, inter alia, students,
> which have an e-Mail address but no domain name. The domain name is
> owned by the university which woulkd have only one vote in the new
> proposed system. The comparison was made to the election system in the
> middle ages where only "landowners" had a right to vote. The decision
> was postponed to the LA Annual Meeting in November 2001. The day after
> the At Large discussion on Montevideo two planes crashed into the twin
> towers in NYC. 
>
> 3. 9/11 changed the political environment for the development of
> ICANN. ICANN was not seen anymore as a project for "cyberdemocracy"
> but as a question for "cybersecurity". US senators came to the ICANN
> meeting in LA and aksed tough questions how it can be avoided that a
> "terrorist" get elected into the ICANN Board of Directors. LA 2001
> became the starting point of the first ICANN reform process.
>
> 4. The ICANN reform process was completed within less than two years.
> It included a restructuring of ICANN. The DNSO was subdivided into the
> GNSO and the CNSO. The PSO was abolished and transformed into 
> "technical liason group". The elections of Voting At Large directors
> were abolished. Instaed of election a "selection" process was
> introduced through a new "Nomimation Committee" (NomCom). The NomCom
> got the right to "select" 8 voting directors in a process, strechted
> over three years (3:3:2). At Large was transfered into an "At Large
> Advisory Committee" (ALAC) with one non-voting liaison in the board.
> New structures with "recognized ALSs" and "RALOs", which had to sign a
> MoU with ICANN, were created. To compensate At Large for the loss of
> the nine voting directors, they got five seats in the NomCom. It was
> intended, that the NomCom will select directors which represent
> users/civil society. 
>
> 5. After the reform was fixed into the new bylaws a lot of big
> supporters of the At Large, Election and Cyberdemocracy concept
> distanced themselves more or less from ICANN. Supporters of the new
> ALAC did not really represent anymore the big civil society NGOs. ALAC
> became something like a "Champions League without Champions". A nunber
> of civil society organisation moved within ICANN to the Non-Commercial
> User Organisation (NCUC), a constituency iwthin the GNSO. However, the
> RALOs were formed, the number of ALSs were growing and over the years,
> ALAC returned to became again a more recognized player in the ICANN
> family. The call for ALAC voting directors came back and culminated
> into the call for holding an "At Large Summit" (ATLAS). ATLAS 1 took
> place 2008 in Mexico. One sub-committee produced a resolution which
> called for two voting seats for ALAC. The Board recognized the
> legitimacy of such a call, however, the compromise was to change the
> non-voting ALAC liaison in the Board into a Voting Director, elected
> by the ALAC itself.
>
> 6. This is the situation which stands until now. In my eyes, ATLAS III
> (recently in Montreal) was a missed opportunity to have a more
> strategic oriented discussion about the role and future of At Large
> (user, civil society) in ICANN as a whole. This was also a missed
> opportunity to ask for a second voting seat in the Board. However, it
> was good to see that NCUC and ALAC entered into a more constructive
> and forward looking dialogue which ould lead to a stronger voice of
> the user/civil society stakeholder group within the empowered community.
>
> 7.  With the IANA transition and the emergence of the "empowered
> community" we have reached a new situation. However, this is not the
> end of the story. In my eyes there is a need for something like a Work
> Stream 3 (WS3) which looks deeper into the existing structure of ICANN
> and how it matches the needs of the 2020s or whether a structural
> reform is needed to adjust it to the new challenges in a post-IANA
> transition period.  With other words, ATLAS IV (2024?) could
> re-introduce the call for a 2nd AT Large voting director.
> Best wishes
>
> Wolfgang
>
>
>  
>> Kaili Kan <kankaili at gmail.com> hat am 17. November 2019 um 06:06
>> geschrieben:
>>
>> As I understand, it was decided at the beginning that ALAC would have
>> two seats, but then was reduced to one seat for some reason.
>>
>> Kaili
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 4:16 AM Alan Greenberg <
>> alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca <mailto:alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca>> wrote:
>>
>>     Other ACs have a Liaison. But At-Large is thr only part of ICANN
>>     that appoints full voting Board Members and has only one.
>>
>>     Alan
>>     -- 
>>     Sent from my mobile. Please excuse brevity and typos.
>>
>>     On November 16, 2019 2:57:36 PM EST, Johan Helsingius <
>>     julf at julf.com <mailto:julf at julf.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         On 16-11-19 18:22, Kaili Kan wrote:
>>
>>             Hopefully, sometime in the future At-Large would get its
>>             second seat on
>>             the Board.
>>
>>         Do other ACs have more than one seat?
>>
>>          Julf
>>
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>  
>
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-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

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