[NA-Discuss] NCUC meeting/Toronto/digital archery

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Tue Jun 19 17:22:32 UTC 2012


I warmly extend greetings from the ALAC liaison to the NCSG (ie, me).

There is a formal ALAC/NCSG meeting on Monday.

One, the NCUC is considering the fairness of digital archery as an issue.
> From what I heard on yesterday's NARALO call, we don't consider it a
> public-interest issue (which, as you know, I disagree with, in other words,
> I agree with the NCUC.
>

There is a difference between agreement in sentiment and agreement in
tactics.

I don't know of ANYONE who disagrees with the sentiment "digital archery is
dumb, and in practical use no better than a lottery than choosing order of
processing". The issue is what to do about it.

The Board has already indicated that it is continuing with DA but may in
fact (and in response to community reaction) toss the results
and try something different. In fact, I've already suggested two
alternative methods, though one of them may attract gaming
attempts<http://diggy.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/how-to-win-a-jellybean-counting-contest/>
.

What wasn't resolved in NARALO, though was:
- how the prioritization of various applications -- let alone its method --
was a matter of public interest
- what At-Large should be doing and is able to do (beyond call attention to
the reputation botch)

Having a dicussion with the NCUC so we can agree about how awfully ICANN
botched DA may relieve stress, but doesn't in itself offer any constructive
recommendations going forward. We can stress the need to look at the only
two existing categories of applicants -- IDNs and community -- as deserving
of priority in any new batching system. But unless we have something new or
novel to add, we'd just be adding to the existing cacophony of protest.

Now... do you have a plan to come out of such discussion with a specific
action item? If so I'm certainly open to change my mind. There is some
flexibility in the NCSG/ALAC agenda, but I myself an averse to simple joint
complaint sessions without an end game.


Two, the NCUC is planning for Toronto.
>

There is certainly an opportunity for joint outreach here.

And: Can we get with them on Toronto and possibly plan something together?
> We did do some joint event planning in San Francisco, which resulted in the
> well-attended Internet Town Hall.
>

While attendance was good, I don't consider the Town Hall to have been very
effective in actually creating any go-forward policy strategy useful for
ICANN. Lost of aired grievances and collective hand wringing, zero action
items resulting. There was debating on which speakers had more credibility
than others when discussing Internet access blocking in Africa. And most of
it was about issues far outside ICANN's realm. So if the target is doing
another meeting like what happened in SF, I'm personally not interested and
would not attend. We're not IGF.


> Just a thought -- strength in numbers.
>

Collecting the numbers, and then not doing anything with the result,
provided a sense of frustration and wasted opportunity that I'd say in
hindsight to have been worse than never having been teased at all.

- Evan



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