[At-Large] Why At-Large is not NCUC-Light

[Nick Ashton-Hart]

Thanks for your note Patrick - see below
On 15 Oct 2007, at 11:51, Patrick Vande Walle wrote:

> Nick Ashton-Hart wrote:
>> FYI, for the edification of those who do not know, ICANN is well
>> aware that there is a real need for information about ICANN, its
>> processes, the issues being dealt with
>>
>> We are ordering translations for LA FWIW. I
>> hope this helps with this particular issue.
>>
> Thanks Nick, this exactly what are looking for: short documents in  
> plain
> French (in our case) rather than English ICANNese. This will hopefully
> help us inform our community about the current issues in a way they  
> can
> understand, and address Adam's concerns.

To be honest, I would personally appreciate reading such documents.  
As a native English speaker, some of our texts are difficult to  
understand; for non-native speakers it must be really tough at times.

> I am not convinced asking them to join a specific WG mailing list is
> sufficient to provide good interactions with other constitutencies and
> get really involved in discussions. Try, for example, to have a ten
> minute conversation with a DNSSEC or IDN technical expert and you are
> most likely to find out that the "simple" requirements of the end-user
> community are actually difficult to implement and may need to be
> reformulated in a more realistic way. It can only happen in F2F  
> meetings.
>

I am not convinced that this is actually the case. I certainly do not  
believe that the entire conversation about such an issue requires a  
F2F meeting.

To take your example, there is nothing to prevent me organising a  
suitable expert on these technologies to be available for a  
telephonic briefing. This could be recorded and made available for  
those not able to ask questions. Those interested in developing a  
position on securing the DNS could then go away, discuss what they  
believe should be said, including via teleconferences to narrow  
options and discuss, and at the end if necessary a further expert- 
briefing on the resulting draft could be arranged again.


> Nick mentioned ICANN funds 105 travels a year for ALAC. I understand
> that this year's budget was mainly used to get the ALSes to  
> meetings to
> sign the MoU. However, there are not 35 people on the ALAC, so next  
> year

Actually this is not true I'm afraid.

The purpose of travel funding is to allow one representative from  
each ALS to attend ICANN meetings when they are in their region. The  
reason that there are 35 people supported for each ICANN meeting is  
so that 20 people from the region nearest the meeting can attend in  
person.

For the remainder of this year, only one meeting will involve signing  
ceremonies, the one in Asia (for the Asian region of course). The  
other meeting in Paris will host the EURALO members who will not be  
signing anything (that I know of anyway).

> there should be a possibility to fund the travel of WG participants.
> However good remote participation can be organized, it still often  
> fails
> on the technical side. It will never replace a F2F meeting.

On the contrary, again I must disagree.

Every other community of ICANN manages to do the vast majority of  
their policy development work on mailing lists and teleconferences.  
At-Large can do the same, and the point of the working groups is to  
allow teams of people who are particularly interested in a given  
subject to work together on it. That modality has already produced  
two outputs: on the RAA, and on IDNs - there's no reason that it  
cannot work on other issues - and indeed it is now being used to work  
on other issues.