[governance] Call for Action: Your comments can Support

[William Drake]

Hi McTim,

I'm puzzled by your objections, could you please explain.

On Mar 24, 2009, at 6:36 AM, McTim wrote:

> Hullo Mary,
>
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 2:35 AM, Mary Wong <MWong at piercelaw.edu>  
> wrote:
>
>> 1. The NCSG proposal is inclusive (not divisive) and democratic.
>>
>> - Membership is open to both individuals and non-commercial  
>> organizations;
>
> yes, but there is a long list of which of these folk are to be
> excluded.

The "long list" simply comprises organizations and individuals that  
patently don't fit in a noncommercial group (e.g.  industry trade  
associations, investors) and will be represented in other stakeholder  
groups as the board has defined these.  The whole scheme of putting  
actors into one stakeholder group and not another is ICANN's, not  
ours, and it maps with standard practices in public policymaking  
bodies (e.g. the new OECD framework) and indeed many standards  
bodies.  If you have a problem with classification of actors per se,  
sorry but there's a big world out there that for sound reasons are not  
based on the IETF model, and ICANN's part of it.  The proposal just  
says how the board's model is to be locally implemented by specifying  
that the noncommercial users SG is for noncommercial users just as the  
commercial users SG is for commercial users etc.  Moreover, it should  
be recalled that we do include the possibility of flexibility  
regarding orgs and individuals in ALAC, and others if they are not  
ineligible due to their own or their organization’s membership in  
another GNSO SG or the ccNSO.

If you want to file a public comment saying the whole architecture  
stinks and SGs and constituencies should be abolished and replaced  
with one big sand box in which consensus among actors with sharply  
different interests will magically emerge through cool technical  
reasoning, do that.  Or, file comments rejecting each and every SG.   
But to reject just ours for being part of a larger framework alongside  
others would be rather unfair.

> The Chair gets to decide, ultimately who can join.

No, the chair plus an elected committee of representatives.  Someone  
has to review and decide on applications, and this is an appropriately  
accountable and transparent way of doing that, guided by explicit  
charter criteria.  It's not a secretive cabal in smoke filled room,  
and I'm hard pressed to imagine plausible scenarios in which someone  
with a credible claim to fit in the noncommercial rather than one of  
the business SGs would be rejected.  And constituency approval is left  
to the board, informed by a public comment period.

>>
>> - In the new SG structure, the existing Non-Commercial User  
>> Constituency
>> (NCUC) group automatically dissolves. Each current NCUC member  
>> (individual
>> or organizational) has to decide whether or not to join the new  
>> NCSG, and no
>> existing NCUC committee or position carries over into the new  
>> structure.
>
> Except for:
>
> " 3.4.4. As a transitional provision, the first election for the  
> June 2009 ICANN
> meeting will elect three (3) NCSG Council Representatives, and the
> terms of the 3
> NCUC Council Representatives elected in October 2008 will run until  
> June 2010."

Yes, Mary, Carlos and I would remain as 3 of the 6, just in the  
transition period.  It would be useful to have some continuity in  
engagement in the counsel's arcane work program, particularly at a  
time when things are being restructured. This hardly represents  
capture by an incumbent cabal, especially since the NCSG will just be  
beginning reformulation and might have trouble coming up with six plug  
and play candidates on the fly.

These objections seem like a pretty thin basis upon which to reject  
the entire proposal, which was developed through an open and  
transparent consultation process and continuously revised in  
interaction with members, staff and board people over months, and is  
far more flexible and democratic than other SG proposals on the  
table.  BTW have you read the Commercial Stakeholder Group (CSG) and  
Registry Stakeholder Group proposals?  Will you be opposing these  
too?  A pox on all ICANN's "houses"?

Thanks,

Bill


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