[NA-Discuss] Revised - Internal ALAC Rules of procedure

[Evan Leibovitch]

Wendy Seltzer wrote:

> Rule 12.2 -- I don't think a quorum should persist after members leave a
> meeting. There's already too great a tendency for ICANN meetings to drag
> on.
>   
I'll respectfully disagree, only because I've seen instances where a
bathroom break has lead to a flurry of pushing through something that
the person(s) temporarily absent didn't want. This is certainly a
worst-case ill-will scenario but I have seen it happen.

The flip side is that people, fed up with a meeting's progress, walk in
order to break quorum and render the rest of the meeting impotent. While
this is also undesirable, even less desirable is giving the remaining
people the ability to push through votes without legitimate mandate. In
any case, any of these situations indicates a poisoned atmosphere that
needs to be corrected anyway.

Look at the discussions we've had internally in NA about even the role
of abstentions. I don't think that any agreement achieved without a
quorum can be legitimately considered a consensus.

> Working with documents: The committee should delegate the drafting and
> re-drafting of documents to a secretariat or subcommittee, which should
> not attempt to make substantive decisions without the group, but should
> use list alternatives that have some support in [brackets] for the group
> as a whole to discuss and resolve.
>   
Agreed. Of course, this process assumes that people who would (and
should) offer various alternative ideas should speak out during the
formative stage, and it was my impression that ALAC preparatory work was
lacking. I guess it would be up to the drafting subcommittee to suitably
poke the committee members for comment in advance, so that objections
aren't all heard at the last minute.

- Evan