[EURO-Discuss] Keep the documentation

[Thomas Roessler]

On 2007-05-16 01:07:46 +0200, Roberto Gaetano wrote:

>> The fact that you have nothing better to do than pull the Jeff
>> Williams card speaks more (and quite disappointingly so!) to
>> your ability to be objective, show leadership, and respect
>> different opinions, than it speaks to the RALO's functioning
>> overall.

> Wow! I might have hit a nerve.

Does "Goodwin's law" ring any bells with you?  The style of argument
that you were using was roughly on the same level (as far as the
ICANN context is concerned), and that's simply not what I would have
expected from you.

> But again, it would help me to know specific cases in which I
> showed lack of objectivity or disrespect of opinions 

See "Jeff Williams" above for just one example.

> (as for leadership, I have pointed out multiple times that I am
> here as an European individual user, nothing more, nothing less,
> therefore I have no claim to any leadership role, quite the
> contrary, I am extremely happy to be able to express opinions
> freely). 

You know very well that your word has more weight than that of just
some user -- you are a board member, after all, and (socially) you
do have a leadership role in this community.  With that kind of role
comes responsibility.

To give one example, though: There have been a number of proposals
early on to say "hey, this shouldn't be an ISOC-only show, let's go
for a combined ticket."

The only answer that that was met with was "nope, and btw, we've no
reason in the written ruls to compromise" -- that's not constructive
dialogue, and just joining the "two ISOC folks on the ticket" crowd
is *far* away from leadership.

In the future, I'd like to see you work toward a compromise that all
ALSes (or at least significantly more than half of them) can agree
to.

>> (Though I'll admit that one conclusion that one might draw 
>> from this entire debacle is that the RALO structure as such is
>> neither functional, nor robust.  One of the underlying reasons
>> for the hesitation to sign the MoU on FITUG's behalf is that I
>> was struggling whether I should recommend returning the ALS
>> accreditation right away.)

> And how would things like extending MoU rights to those who do
> not assume MoU obligations, or enlarging the Board to whoever
> wants to join, make it more functional, or robust?

You're attacking a strawman.  I never claimed that any of these
steps would lead to more robustness.

What I do claim, though, is that any of these steps might have made
it easier to establish a collaborative tone here -- as opposed to
the style of discussion that we've seen.

To your "established decisions" point: When roughly half the members
of a set that is supposed to have some kind of consensus expressed a
large amount of unhappiness with decisions that had purportedly been
made, it might have been a good idea to revisit these decisions, and
find a compromise between the different directions of thought.  The
fact that this hasn't happened, to me, is one of the main causes why
EURALO currently looks much more like a trainwreck where folks are
fighting about the best place in the first car, than like a serious
attempt to adovcate users' rights and interests in ICANN *together*
-- which is what it should really be.

-- 
Thomas Roessler   <roessler at does-not-exist.org>