[NA-Discuss] Voting None of the Above Re: …

Fri Jul 20 21:57:59 UTC 2012

Dear Kieren,

as NARALO is currently going through elections and our staff is
otherwise engaged and therefore has little bandwidth to devote to
providing you with answers at the moment, let me oblige:

On 19/07/2012 17:39, Kieren McCarthy wrote :
> At the risk at getting embroiled in pointless name-calling, John I think
> you are demonstrating precisely the mindset that is behind the reason that
> only one person is standing for each of the four positions.
>
> So here are some questions:
>
> * How many NARALO members are there?

How many people read dot-nxt? Impossible to know. Our ALSes do not
provide an exact detail of how many members they have.

> * How many ALSes in North America are there?

21 by my count. This is shown on: https://community.icann.org/x/kQCq
which is publicly available.

> * How many individuals are subscribed to this mailing list?

100 email addresses in total. Some people are subscribed more than once.
Only staff and myself have access to this data so no need to blame
NARALO for not knowing.

> * What is the subscribe/unsubscribe rate of the list each month for the
> past six months?

There has been very little subscribe/unsubscribe traffic on the NARALO
list so it is fair to say that the list has a steady membership.

> * How many individuals engage on this mailing list?

There is a link to the list archives at the bottom of my message and
I'll let you do the statistics on this.

> * Is there an NARALO Facebook page?
> * Is there an NARALO Twitter presence?

With no staff support for these things at NARALO level, this would be up
to NARALO members to set-up.

> * Is there a NARALO newsletter? How many are subscribed to it?
> * Is there a NARALO summary of events for members for ICANN Prague?
>
> These are basic questions, basic steps for a grassroots organization. And
> they all cost $0.

They cost volunteer time. These are people who have a day job, families
and more volunteer work to perform in the ALS that they are a member of
-- because ALSes are organizations which perform work outside of ICANN
and ICANN activities are only a small subset of what those organizations do.
Do you wish to edit a NARALO newsletter? You would be welcome to do so!

As for a NARALO summary of events for members for ICANN Prague, I have
submitted a report with the great help from Staff which can be
downloaded from:
http://prague44.icann.org/meetings/prague2012/presentation-alac-chair-29jun12-en.pdf

This provides a summary of our activities during the Prague meeting. Why
duplicate work when our resources are already stretched?

Kieren, this community does a heck of a lot more work than it is ever
credited for.

The problem is that if it takes time reporting on what it does, it
hasn't got enough time to do the actual work. We have dozens of parallel
threads going on, both on policy and on procedure. All of them are super
important. But our staff and volunteer resources are stretched. The ALAC
Web site is due for renewal/replacement -- that's in the works. A
communications policy is being worked on with the ICANN comms dept. A
technology taskforce is working on making better use of technology to
ease the work on our members. An outreach WG is looking at outreach.
Then we have capacity building and inreach. The list is endless, and
none of us are polymaths, able to do everything. So we often do things
which are not our job spec. and it takes time. None of us are public
communications experts like you, so if you think you can do a better job
and help this community in building the user input at ICANN, then please
do so. If on the other hand you are just going to criticise
destructively, then this community is wasting valuable time reading your
messages instead of doing the work they need to do.

I am sorry to be so blunt, but the tone of your emails is negative thus
you won't make any friends here if you pursue this thread in such an
unfair way. You are targeting hard working volunteers and that's not fair.

Warmest regards,

Olivier

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-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html