[governance] communicating with our peers

[Adam Peake]

Thanks for these comments.

I agree a risk of two lists is people may default to the closed.  And 
the ALAC lists are an example.

Could this tendency be avoided if before a thread's started on the 
closed list or moved to the closed list there must be a note about 
this on the open list. All would then know there was a discussion 
going on, and at some point it would be summarized back (in some 
form).  If the closed list were used to excess then it should be 
obvious.

Personally I'd much prefer a closed list for some discussions.

Adam



At 10:50 AM +0100 2/10/08, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
>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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