[At-Large] ALS lists - why no public archive?

[Vittorio Bertola]

Adam Peake ha scritto:
> So the ALS encourage their members to get involved in the regional 
> discuss lists?  Are they successful?

It's often the opposite, there is someone inside an ALS who particularly 
cares about ICANN issues, so raises awareness inside his/her 
organization, gets it accredited, and participates in discussions, 
getting back to the ALS mailing list or assembly when there is something 
interesting to report or to discuss.

All in all, I tend to see one, sometimes two active individuals per ALS, 
though you'd have to get into each individual ALS to understand how much 
they liaise back with their own community. There are not hundreds of 
individuals eager to participate in ICANN policy discussions anyway (we 
don't do consumer surveys for ICANN, by the way - should we? we've been 
discussing that sometimes, but I don't see how a group of volunteers 
could do that kind of work in a statistically meaningful way on a global 
scale).

> I've been trying to work out what role (if any) the ALS and perhaps 
> those lists were playing in informing users. It's not clear to me how 
> the ALS (therefore RALO and ALAC) are supporting this commitment to 
> informed participation etc.  And as I've tried to explain, given the 
> review (of ALAC and NomCom), Vint's and other's comments, if ALAC can 
> show it is really representing user interests through a solid 
> "bottom-up" process, then it has a opportunities for much greater 
> influence in ICANN.
> 
> Current set up seems as though there is almost a cutoff between the 
> individuals who should be the membership of ALS

"should be"? All the ALSes have individual members (even if we now have 
orgs of orgs pushing to get in, and getting quite upset if we tell them 
no, so they might be allowed to join in the future).

> and policy development. 
> They are asked to join one organization so they can be recognized, then 
> join a different group to discuss policy. Organise locally, but discuss 
> policy regionally. Awkward, no?

You usually don't join an ALS just to participate in ICANN. You already 
formed a group locally that deals with this kind of issues, then you 
decide that you want to be involved in ICANN directly, and you sign up. 
It's also very unlikely that you're interested in ICANN and nothing 
else, more likely you're interested in broad Internet governance issues 
(possibly more in the content-related ones) and pick ICANN as a part of 
it when something particularly interesting comes up there.

> I might be confused, perhaps you could point to the policy discussion of 
> the ALS you represent and the other ALS that have recently formed the EU 
> RALO?  How many of your ALS members (ISOC IT) subscribe of the EU RALO 
> discuss list?

None but me. They delegate me to take care of this. ISOC Italy is an 
organization with about 100 members, most of which join just to stay 
tuned and support the education and lobbying activities that we do. 
About a third, I'd say, is active on the internal general discussion 
mailing list. A few of them are active beyond that, e.g. Council 
members, and among them they take responsibilities for different parts 
of the job. So I took ICANN because I liked it :)

Why do you think that it could be different? Do you really expect, say, 
25 people * 20 ALSes = 500 individuals active at the European level on 
the same mailing list on ICANN-related issues? That'd be quite an 
unintelligible discussion, by the way. Most people like to support and 
delegate work to someone else :)

> I have a feeling that without clear evidence that the policy coming from 
> ALAC is representative of individual users views, then ALAC will never 
> grow beyond it's current weak position in ICANN's organizational structure.

It is representative to the extent that people are actually interested 
not just in discussing these arcane issues like on any web forum (or 
like at the pub, in front of a beer) but actually devoting a lot of time 
  for actual participation in policy making processes. Certainly there 
might be issues (e.g. .xxx) where thousands of end users have strong 
views, but they'll never bother to join any kind of process just for 
that - they'll just flood paul.twomey at icann.org with form letters 
(which, by the way, is what actually happened with .xxx). It is not this 
kind of "user participation" that we are talking about. We are talking 
about a much smaller subset of users that are interested in advocating 
user views and participating to painfully slow policy making processes 
over a span of several years - and of course there's very few of them. 
So we have a complex structure to ensure that those few have some kind 
of representational selection process behind them, which of course is 
more objective and legitimate as the number of participants grows up.

> Why set the bar low for ALAC?  ALAC's task is to represent individuals, 
> we should set our own standards, not look to how others have got out of 
> their commitments.

Fair point, but pardon me if I'm somewhat reluctant to start again 
questioning the legitimacy of this process after several years. In terms 
of transparency, I think that we're as open as one could be. In terms of 
accessibility, any user group in the world can join for free, and is 
likely to find people in their own Region as a friendly contact, 
possibly in their own language. We can discuss how effective we were in 
reaching out, and of course anything can be made better, but only within 
reasonable expectations - and we welcome practical proposals on how to 
make things better, if you have any.

On the other hand, if the requirement is that we have to get each of one 
billion Internet users to sign up explicitly to our mailing list, for us 
to be legitimate... do you really mean that? I don't think so.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------