[At-Large] Fwd: ATLASIII Participation

[Karl Auerbach]

On 7/12/19 5:53 AM, Christian de Larrinaga wrote:
> In no way to detract from any point you are making. But this is the
> first I've heard about ATLAS participation or these ICANN courses. I
> also have no idea whether this matters in the slightest.

I, as well, found these requirements surprising.  They reminded me of 
19th century European sovereigns who claimed that their colonial 
governments in Africa were necessary because the people there were 
incapable of deciding questions that were important to their own lives.

Yes, that is a harsh assessment.  But imposition of participation 
requirements, such as mandatory education, smacks of "top down" management.

Yes, people who don't know the lingo of the meeting do slow things 
down.  But ICANN has been wandering around, doing essentially little 
except promote certain intellectual property and business interests for 
more than two decades.  "Efficient" is not a word that seems to exist in 
the ICANN universe.

Why not a list of suggested readings rather than a mandatory gauntlet?

Much of the potential of ICANN is not in following the deeply rutted 
path of what ICANN has done over the last two decades but, rather, in 
what is possible when one explores the green fields to the sides of the 
old road.

Mandatory courses can be blinders - devices used on horses so that they 
could see only what was in front of them, not to the sides.

Those mandatory courses tell potential participants what has been; not 
what is possible.

Nor are those courses complete.  For instance, is there material that 
explains how (or why) ICANN arrived at the present Byzantine structure 
or what the alternatives were (and perhaps still are)?

Those courses reminded me of when I started in the field of networking 
that we had to learn about circuits and BiSync and HASP because that was 
the way thing were done.  It was revolutionaries like Luis Pouzin, Don 
Davies, and Paul Baran who said "we don't need circuits, packets are 
sufficient" that broke us out of the status quo and led to the 
end-to-end principle and the internet.

(There are even more harsh assessments of imposed orthodoxy.  I am 
reminded of Mao's Red Book [which was pilloried in a great aria - 
https://youtu.be/TyiKxltknZI ].)

             --karl--