[NA-Discuss] On air-worthiness and unintended consequences

[Evan Leibovitch]

There was much said in yesterday's NARALO "listening session" regarding how
At-Large's travel slots should be allocated. Hard workers, subject matter
experts and frequent contributors, it has been argued, ought to deserve
priority over those who may be "entitled" due to their position.

My comments, based on early RALO history -- that the hard-fought
availability of travel for elected and appointed positions was achieved
*precisely because* they were elected and appointed -- were widely derided
as archaic and demanding update.

May be. But be careful what you wish for.

At-Large currently has 29 travel slots *because* there are exactly 29
RALO-elected, NomCom-appointed and ALAC liaison positions formally
identified. The day that ALAC de-couples these slots from leadership roles
is precisely the day when ICANN senior management starts to reduce the
number of slots. After all, if ALAC is going to say that it should just be
the most-needed people at a meeting (by whatever criteria, it doesn't
matter), then there's nothing special about the number 29.

"We have a budget crunch and can only afford to pay for the top 25," we
will hear. Or 20. Or whatever arbitrary number ICANN decides it can afford.
Without linkage to elected and appointed roles, there is no longer a solid
rationale for 29.

Indeed there are many flaws in the status quo. Little accountability exists
for elected and appointed ALAC leaders who choose to under-participate in
meetings for which their travel was subsidized. Meanwhile, many
over-participating people are denied the utility of learning ICANN culture
and doing ALAC advocacy while people seen to be mere tourists and entitlled
are paid to go.

But however awful that status quo is, all of the proposed solutions are
worse. Like it or not, those "tourists" were legitimately selected by their
RALOs or the NomCom through their own very regimented processes of
determining, well, worthiness. Any benefit of ranking "more-worthy" people
at the outset is outweighed by the anti-democratic and top-down nature of
whatever process is used to determine "worthy". Furthermore, the number of
travel-worthy people that ought to be subsidized also then becomes wholly
arbitrary.

Tread carefully. Hundreds of person-hours spent thrashing over any criteria
of "worthy" will be mostly wasted, if far fewer of these
newly-deemed-deserving folks are actually able to travel.

-- 
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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