[At-Large] At-Large Summit update

[Jean Armour Polly]

To me, the idea of an Internet User's "Summit" is not really the 
right idea in these times. The reason is that there is room for only 
a few at a summit.  The Internet allows every user a seat at the 
table--everyone is a publisher--everyone has a blog--everyone is a 
video producer-- so everyone must be a summit attendee-- and that is 
the energy we should think how to engage.

Internet users per se don't really seem interested in bottom-up 
hierarchical things, anymore, at least from what I have seen. The 
interest is in ad-hoc, flash mob, street team sorts of things. I 
think Internet users are more about what their individual needs are 
rather than some arbitrary geographic needs.

It's pretty clear to me that ICANN listens as much to any body of 
individual users as much as it listens to whatever ALAC has to say. 
In fact, an outside "constituency" may even have MORE influence than 
ALAC/At Large does-- witness the pressure put on ICANN to drop 
negotiations with .XXX when the US Department of Commerce got all 
those emails from the Christian right.

So... what I am saying is that maybe we should be looking at  a very 
loose , lightweight *something else*-- Internet users union? That 
could quickly coalesce around certain issues-- and these might be 
ICANN issues or they might be issues outside of ICANN-- but they are 
Internet user issues. If "everyone's at-large" then let's figure out 
how to get "everyone" at a summit. And of course I mean a virtual 
space. I don't think I'm thinking of Second Life, and I don't 
necessarily think it's a wiki either, thought it could have wiki 
tendencies. It's more like a FaceBook, with Groups. Then I think 
there needs to be a donated button on every search engine and major 
portal  "Internet User? Join the Union and speak out"-- that leads 
people back to where they can find each other and raise issues and 
find others interested in those issues. I'm thinking of something 
like Epinions for the Internet-- issues, sites, service providers, 
etc etc. Once the energy is together, finding the right agencies to 
do something about those issues becomes the next step. Sometimes it 
will be ICANN but other times it is going to be somewhere else.

How is this funded? I don't know, but there are plenty of models out there.
http://www.uriica.org/ has been working in this direction for awhile- 
doubtless there are others. What is possibly different about what I'm 
saying is that hierarchical is dead, it is the Individual User who 
wants a say --The Internet user just wants mail to go thru and 
websites to load and doesn't care to know a thing about DNS.--And 
he/she has probably never heard of ICANN-- so we need to go where 
those users are (search engines, portals, facebook, youtube...) and 
engage them, give them a voice, and don't make them go through a 
series of hierarchical hoops to be heard.

Just my thoughts.
Jean Armour Polly
Ex-ALAC NA