[EURO-Discuss] Improvement of the win-win relationship between the Staff and the At-Large Community

[JFC Morfin]

At 17:56 10/06/2008, At-Large Staff wrote:
>For your convenience, below you will find a restated set of the same
>questions.

This answer is based upon the vision that ICANN is not necessary to 
the Internet on an Internet @large point of view, but necessary to 
some members of the Internet community. As such ICANN :

1) must undertake a transition towards a mission which is not yet 
well defined as enhanced cooperation has not been really discussed by 
the WSIS community. It is therefore likely that this mission will not 
be finalized before the end of JPA and IGF.

2) @large are probably probably going to be the toughest competition 
ICANN will meet in the coming years if it engages into a TLD 
marketing campaign, because the technical evolution is to a dillution 
of the DNS in terms of TLDs and semantic addressing. (This conforms 
to ICANN ICP-3 document ICANN should reread).

>  1.   What issues being debated in ICANN do you believe are the most
>important to your RALO?

- which services ICANN can bring to the @large community in terms of 
network operations (escrow is an idea).
- Mostly ICANN can help RALO meetings, and RALOs progressive autonomy 
from ICANN in order to become credible ICANN interfaces (RALO must 
take over an interest in practical operations ISOC has never taken). 
Otherwise it will be a grassroots @large deployment. These kinds of 
move are slow and call for adequate/credible tools/applications. I 
think we see them coming (ex. unbound).

>2.   How can we help make the time you spend on ICANN issues as valuable and
>efficient to you as possible?

- In listening and reporting to the BoD. @large are no value to ICANN 
if they are not accepted as field experts. What is certainly 
difficult is to assess the exact field of expertise of each of them 
(usage, PRs, operations, DNS, legal, political, future, connections, 
etc.). This kind of work calls for a great expertise in the Internet 
field, just to be able to understand the implications of what is reported.

Example: ICANN should work out an agreement with IETF on a IETF/ICANN 
WG- at large able to interface @larges. Not so much to answer @larges, 
but to get commented/translated field inputs from @larges as lead 
users. Probably the same with the GAC.

>3.   What challenges and opportunities do you see for your RALO and for
>At-Large more generally (in the context of ICANN work)?

Getting ICANN to properly define a strategic objective which fits 
whith what Internet users might be interested in. The real risk is an 
ICANN split due to a disagreement between what ICANN proposes and 
what users really wait for.

>4.   How interaction between and within RALOs be increased?

f2f specialised meetings. Working/Reporting on a given topic. With 
external experts.

>5.   What are the top three things you would like your RALO to achieve?

- participate in creating the Euro-IGF
- document a position on ICANN future and specific services to Europe
- accredit france at large :-)

>6.   What are the top three things you believe ICANN Staff could do to help
>your RALO?

- explain why they opposed france at large
- work on support of the RALO through working tools. Mailing lists 
(ICANN Staff should be explained about) are not sufficient. This is a 
community wide need ICANN should be associated with
- organising the funding of network oriented Open Source projects. 
GPL is not oriented towards networking solutions. (cf. RFC 3869)

jfc