[lac-discuss-en] Letter from ALAC to the Board of ICANN

[At-Large Staff]

Dear Community:

Today the following was transmitted to the ALAC Board Liaison, Wendy
Seltzer, for communication to the Board of ICANN by the At-Large Advisory
Committee. The text is reproduced directly below in order to faciliate
machine translation of the text into Spanish. You may review the text online
and retrieve a PDF at
https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?letter_to_the_board_on_public_participat
ion.
--

From: Cheryl Langdon-Orr, Chair of the ALAC

Thursday, December 11, 2008

To: Chairman of the ICANN Board, Mr. Peter Dengate-Thrush

Transmitted via email through the ALAC Liaison to the Board.

Dear Peter,

I write to you today at the request of the At-Large Advisory Committee to
convey the disappointment that they and the wider At-Large community have
with the way in which the public forum in Cairo was organised in particular,
and to express our concern with other elements of the Cairo meeting in
general.

Perhaps it is most descriptive to give the Board some sense of the mood and
reaction to this part of the Cairo meeting, if I quote one commentator -
³For a public forum to be organised in a way that lurches from unacceptable
change to unacceptable change during the meeting itself in a way that allows
grandees sufficient time to make speeches, yet disenfranchises the community
by providing almost no time whatever for its concerns to be aired speaks to
a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose of ICANN¹s meetings on
the part of those responsible.²

In more general terms what I have heard is that, Œthe public forum is not a
time for canned speeches ­ it is a time for the ICANN community of
volunteers to air their concerns to the Board, the Staff, and one another,
with sufficient time for those concerns to be heard and to be addressed and
discussed.¹ (Paraphrased from several people¹s statements at or after Cairo
meeting). The At-Large Community is most concerned that those organising the
meetings fail to understand this fundamental principle and we trust that
this concerns you and the rest of the Board as much as it does us. The
At-Large community joins those others who have written to you in expecting
the Board taking decisive action to ensure that the debacle we experienced
in Cairo never reoccurs.

This is especially important given the fact that the Public Forum in Paris
was mismanaged. The idea that a snap Œsurvey¹, conducted at the last minute,
should govern the organisation of that public forum is ludicrous and the
fact that only a handful of people responded (given the short timeframe
little else can be expected) should have ensured that the idea of allowing
such a small sample of the community to dictate the organisation of
something as important as the public forum would be abandoned. Unfortunately
it seems that basic common sense eluded the people responsible on that
occasion just as it did again in Cairo.

ICANN¹s constituents are volunteers ­ a point that seems lost upon those who
are in charge of organising its meetings.  We don¹t fly across the world ­
at our own expense, for many of those not fortunate enough to receive travel
support - to listen to canned speeches, or to watch our few opportunities
for genuine public interaction with the Board and other communities vanish
almost in front of our eyes based upon the poor judgment of those
responsible.

Further, the provisions for remote participation in ICANN meetings which is
vital for the involvement of our At-Large Community is far from satisfactory
and have been so for years, and those responsible seem to be allowed to
endlessly continue to get away with not fixing the problem. Our community
asks (again paraphrased) ŒWhy do the repeated calls for remote participation
that works get ignored, and why does the Board continue to allow this
obvious failure to remain unaddressed?¹

To be clear, issues such as the following are unacceptable:

·       Main meeting agendas with mistakes (including meeting records on the
public schedule showing the same meetings taking place at the same time,
going uncorrected for days;

·      Very poor quality chat interfaces attached to meetings which are
unmonitored by staff so that these chat sessions are not acknowledged or
their input aired to the main meeting;

·      Lack of telephonic participation options for meetings that work
reliably. After six meetings of technically hopeless telephonic
participation facilities for At-Large¹s meetings, in Cairo we didn¹t even
bother to try.  
http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/at-large_atlarge-lists.icann.org/20
08q4/004925.html 

·       Receiving very large documents in English-only on the eve of a
meeting¹s start, and then expecting attendees to comment and participate in
sessions related to these texts. The New GTLDs documents are just the latest
example of this problem. This is a totally unreasonable burden on volunteers
and reinforces an imbalance between those who make money from registration ­
who will read things no matter when they are released because their business
depends on them ­ and everyone else. If substantive documents cannot be made
available at least two weeks before a meeting ­ in multiple language
versions ­ don¹t bother arranging sessions to talk about them at the meeting
and don¹t start consultations on them until well after the meeting is over.

ICANN spends a lot of registrant-derived funds on its meetings and on
participation mechanisms. They should be run to a far more professional
standard than they currently are.  It also should be approaching the entire
idea of participation in a far more significant and serious way than has
been done in the past. We hope that the board-level discussions on
participation provide a venue for that discussion, but we wish to make it
clear that a lot of talk is not what¹s required. The community needs and
deserves for its participation to be taken seriously and for those
responsible in ICANN to be held to account for the (currently completely
inadequate and often unprofessional) job they do with respect to meetings
and participation enhancement systems. We expect that the board will take
action to remind those responsible of their obligations and call them to
account for their performance.

We would like to suggest the creation of an organization meeting committee
with one participant from each SO/AC helping on building a better (more
useful) meeting.

There is also a point of personal concern I wish to raise as Chair of the
ALAC, the matter of the reasons for the Œcompressed time¹ remaining for the
public forum in Cairo... It has been reported back to me from Œthe rumour
mill¹ to be in some way related to the new activity of the Joint AC and SO
parts of the planned and advertised Cairo Agenda... To designate this as
ridiculous and erroneous is the very least I can say, and indeed to say it
is destructive and malicious is more accurate. I urge the Board to ensure
this rumour is countermanded strongly and effectively as soon as is
possible.

Finally and most importantly on a positive note, the ALAC notes and wishes
to recognise the efforts being made by the Board to remedy and improve
public participation with its newly established Public Participation
Committee of the Board (PPBC). Perhaps this is an ideal opportunity for the
Chair and others from this committee to join us in a single topic discussion
that we could arrange for one of our regular (at least) monthly briefing
calls. This would also allow Kieren to be involved, as is quite proper and
indeed is something he offered both in Cairo (in conversation with me) and
since via email ³I will be more than happy to go through everything from my
side and to talk them through what happened and why, what changes are afoot
and so on.² (Dec 9th 2008).

To this end the ALAC ExCom would be more than happy to plan such a call (as
it will be most timely before our At-Large Summit in Mexico) in the week
starting January 12th 2009 and will ask our staff to see what can be
arranged, set up a doodle for best times and dates, and of course liaise
with Kieren on this matter. If the new PPBC desires to be involved in this
activity (or some future alternate) then this would be most welcome, and the
PPBC Chair need only let us know their availability or plans.

Our community recognizes and appreciates that genuine efforts are being made
to improve meetings and remote participation, for future meetings and indeed
that new line up in the Meetings Team along with Paul Levins and of course
Kieren will with the input of the PPBC make significant changes, but our
At-Large Community and specifically those who are not on site at ICANN
Meetings but rely in remote participation methods and archived materials to
interact have made it clear to our Committee that our concerns need to
formally registered.
 

(Signed on behalf of the ALAC)
Cheryl Langdon-Orr
ALAC Chair 2007-2009


-- 
Regards,

Nick Ashton-Hart, Matthias Langenegger, Heidi Ullrich, Marie-Helene Bouchoms
ICANN At-Large Staff
email: staff at atlarge.icann.org