[NA-Discuss] Suspension of Posting Privileges for Eric Brunner Williams

[Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond]

On 19/06/2013 17:49, Garth Bruen wrote:
> No one's voice is ICANN's policy discussion is limited, this concerns the
> necessary limiting personal comments which detract from the value of our
> discussion.

+1 Garth.

The ALAC Rules of Procedure specifically prohibit the use of At-Large
lists for ad-hominem allegations:

Rule 22.11 Postings that are, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or
misrepresents another person,

In addition, ICANN Bylaws on conduct also allude to standards of
behaviour that are expected of participants.

It would be counter-productive to say that removal of ad-hominem
offensive postings limits someone's voice in ICANN Activities. Quite the
contrary, inflammatory postings targeted at individuals break the
harmony of the discussions and deter good participants from being
actively involved, for fear of reprisal. All At-Large lists are archived
and the archives are crawled by Internet search engines - occasionally,
libellous statements end up in a search engine search - something that
(potential) employers, clients, family and friends can find.

I am sad that occasionally someone has to be suspended from a mailing
list, especially if that person has made, and continues to make some
very valuable contributions, and I therefore hope that this will serve
as a lesson and we can return to constructive dialogue.

On the matter of ALSes, work is under way in the community regarding
metrics for all parts of At-Large, from the ALSes all the way up to RALO
leadership, ALAC members, the ALAC Chair and to the Board member
selected by the At-Large community. This is a complex challenge and will
take time to design, discuss and implement. It is not by naming and
shaming one ALS at a time that we can achieve a better and more active
At-Large Community, quite contrary. It is through the design of reliable
feedback and evaluation processes (I prefer not to use the
bastardization of this concept named Return on Investment - ROI) which
include safeguards for the avoidance of abuse of the system to repress
free contribution and turn the system overly top-down, that we can
address these issues. The challenge comes from the fact that we are
constantly going into what is new territory for many of us. So help from
people who have experienced an effective method for bottom-up
organisational enhancement will be very welcome when the work gets under
way in each RALO and in the ALAC Metrics working group.

Everyone's bandwidth is limited. We are all volunteers. With your
collective help, we can hopefully get there faster.

Kindest regards,

Olivier MJ  Crépin-Leblond
ALAC Chair