[governance] communicating with our peers

[Vittorio Bertola]

Ian Peter ha scritto:
> My experience with organizations which have adopted the one open, one closed
> list approach is that the majority of discussion just moves over to the
> closed list over time, whether it is sensitive or not. If there are two
> lists, there still has to be a mechanism to achieve transparency around
> issues where the closed list has been utilized.

My experience with the ALAC - which adopts that approach - is that, 
notwithstanding regular appeals by the Chairman and by some committed 
members, most group and staff members would continuously move 
discussions to the private list, even the ones that had started in 
public; in fact, several people, in full honesty, seem to think that 
group discussions should be private except when there is a need to go 
public. I'm not in the ALAC any more, but things seem to be actually 
getting worse over time; with an ICANN meeting starting right now and 
tons of issue discussions and preparatory work going on, in this initial 
stretch of February the public ALAC list had an average of one message a 
day, of which just two were by ALAC members.

This is just an example, but there seems to be a constant pattern so 
that we all agree on the importance of transparency and we all complain 
when fellow civil society members do not send long and prompt reports 
and do not disclose each and every detail of what is happening behind 
the doors, but whenever we get appointed to one of these groups we start 
behaving secretly, or at least we fail to allocate sufficient energy to 
fulfill the same commitment to transparency that we require to others.

Of course this is an average assessment, and there are some people who 
do put a lot of effort in communicating when they are appointed inside 
closed groups (honestly, I think I always tried hard), but practicing 
and preaching tend to often be two very separate worlds.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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