[At-Large] DOODLE: At-Large Community Call / At-Large Director Appointment Process

[Karl Auerbach]

On 09/24/2009 01:58 PM, Alan Greenberg wrote:

I don't agree with your reading.

First of all, the ALAC is an "Advisory Committee" not a "Supporting 
Organization".  The history of ICANN demonstrates that those are rather 
different things.

Second you are hanging a lot on the word "select" (and variations of 
that word).  There is a lot of history behind "select" - California law 
imposes a number of (good) requirements on "membership" corporations, 
which arise when there is an election to fill board seats.  ICANN danced 
around that and made a big deal about calling the elections "selections" 
in order to evade the statute.  See: 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/platform.htm#full-members

By-the-way, "select" != "appoint".

Third you found an instance in which the bylaws use the word At-Large 
Community.  I don't read that use as defining an equivalence between 
"At-Large Community" and ALAC+RALO+ALS, particularly in light of the 
subsequent j.3 that suggests that "community" is something more broad.

And finally the board resolution referred to and approved a board 
working group recommendation that was based on our ALAC review working 
group recommendation - and in our recommendation we made it very clear 
that we intended a broad reading that went beyond the bounds of the 
existing ALAC to encompass every user of the net.

I have serious doubts that we would have been able to muster a majority 
on our working group had our recommendation be that that the board seats 
only be open to- and selected by- ALAC/RALO/ALS people.

Apart from semantically nit-picking apart the board resolution, it is 
hard to reconcile ICANN as a "public-benefit" body (which is what it is 
under the law of its incorporation) with the dependent ALAC/RALO/ALS 
tangle as the sole path to onto ICANN's primary decision making bodies.

I (and others) had to fight hard to get our working group to overturn 
the Westlake recommendation that there be no publicly chosen directors. 
  I would not have bothered had our goal been to make it an 
ALAC/RALO/ALS-only process.

		--karl--