[governance] Speakers for IGF - ideas?

[Karl Auerbach]

veni markovski wrote:

> If those, who are "right" never want to spend time and help ICANN 
> achieve its goals, change, perform better, etc., etc., then they are not 
> the "right" ones.

"never"?  That strikes me as a rather unjustifiable pejorative against 
so many good people who have spent so much time and effort over the years.

To provide just one quantitative instance:

My direct, unreimbursed costs of trying to help ICANN achieve its goals 
during my 30 months as an ICANN director amounted to several hundred 
thousand dollars (US).  One other director at that time estimated his 
drect and unreimbursed losses from being on the board at around the same 
level: $300,000 per year.  My indirect costs were at least order of 
magnitude greater.

And that does not count the rather significant amount that was expended 
to go to court ICANN's unlawful actions when it tried to muzzle a 
director who merely wanted to look, as he was empowered to do by law, at 
ICANN's financial books.

Of course, there are those, some of whom might be in the employ of 
ICANN, who might say that I wasn't trying to "help" ICANN.  Such a 
comment would, of course, be entirely untrue.

The lesson one can draw here for internet governance is that the debates 
can easily grind down to a level in which valid points of view are 
dismissed because they are labeled, simply because they do not hew the 
company line, as unconstructive.

So, for new institutions of internet governance, it seems that we need 
to find ways to require that the institution fully consider all input, 
no matter the source, without bias or prejudgement.

That has always been a difficult problem for governance bodies.  One of 
the best methods to counteract the natural siege mentality of such 
bodies is to provide a continuous fresh flow of new faces and a 
mechanism through which those who are affected, in our case the members 
of the community of internet users, can recall decision makers who are 
unresponsive either immediately or on some periodic basis.

		--karl--



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