[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Vittorio Bertola]

Kieren McCarthy ha scritto:
> It strikes me that if you ignore the torrid history and clash of egos over
> the years, that the ALAC/RALO/ALS system is a pretty logical structure,
> designed to be scalable and to ensure regional representation.
> 
> But many of the comments on this list take as a presumption that this is not
> a logical structure. 
> 
> I think everyone may be missing the bigger picture. 
> 
> For example, with this election argument: no one is pondering where the
> candidates - or, rather, the best candidates - come from. 

I think that you got the key points of why we designed the structure 
like that, five years ago; I'm happy to see that, once one gets deeper 
into the complexities of the mechanism, the need for a "glocal" and 
multilayered system becomes self-evident.

However, there are a couple of things that, IMHO, do not work well and, 
in hindsight, may need to be readdressed.

The first is that the system tends to bubble up good politicians, but 
not good workers. Of course I am grossly simplifying, but during these 
years not many of the ALAC members were interested in rolling up their 
sleeves and producing policy input to ICANN, or being practical enough 
to focus on current end-user problems. Most of them were more interested 
in discussing high level political issues such as WSIS, relationships 
with the USG, or even more often the internalities of the At Large 
itself, i.e. procedural issues. Not all ALAC members see the ALAC as a 
service to the community at large - many see it as a way to promote 
personal opinions and their pet issues, and in a few cases people seemed 
only focused on self-promotion.

The third is that the system is not representative yet, and in this I 
think that Karl has a point. Sure we'll not get millions of citizens 
directly interested in ICANN, and sure the disinformed and nationalistic 
(when not plainly random) votes of the 2000 elections were very far from 
actual democracy (more similar to practical democracy, the one that 
elects Bush and Berlusconi). However, the ALAC "bubbling up" system 
mostly failed in bringing up the issues that registrants really care 
about. There is a lack of end user participation at the bottom level; 
the ALSes were mostly meant to be "entry points" that could take care of 
identifying and gathering the users, and providing information to them 
in local languages; however, there has always been the idea that some 
form of general, individual-based election would eventually take place, 
or at least that a smart and committed individual, by entering the 
system at an ALS, could very quickly get to the top level, without being 
blocked by layers of bureaucracy and established leaderships. The ALSes 
and their leadership have too much power in the present system, and they 
tend to capture the scene.

However, these are points that can be addressed, and I expect that 
(assuming that I continue participating in ICANN) there will be a chance 
to discuss them thoroughly.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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