[governance] Fixing an ICANN problem

[Milton L Mueller]

Danny,
You ask for suggestions to "remedy" the overall situation. To identify a remedy one must first identify the cause. 

The main reason NCUC's attendance in minor, specialized WGs has been minimized in the last 9 months is that it has been forced to fight a political battle for its very existence, and this has absorbed nearly all of the energies of its key activists. It seems, at least for now, to have won that battle and to have finally persuaded key Board members to take a more sensible approach to the formation of new Stakeholder Groups. It has also been forced to devote an enormous amount of energy into recruiting new members. Going forward you will see an expansion in our activity on a broad variety of areas, now that the organizational issue sare more or less settled. 

NCUC has however been extremely active on two issues that have much greater priority: the IRT/STI work on trademark protection in new TLDs, and the registtry-registrar separation issue. 

The WG you list are extremely technical and narrow in focus. Most of the new members we are recruiting simply would have no idea how to cope with them, either procedureally or substantively. It is a matter of education. We have succeeded in bringing in a whole new generation of members, but the idea that an NGO from Sri Lanka can join NCUC Tuesday and jump into a workshop on the intricacies of inter-registrar contracts on Wednesday is plainly unrealistic. This is all volunteer labor, and people tend to gravitate toward what they know and even then, it takes time to understand icann processes and politics. 

As an interesting and related question, may I ask you: did you participate in any of these WGs? As a former member of NCUC, you had many opportunities to do so but, as I recall, never did. Perhaps you can help answer your own question. 

--MM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Danny Younger [mailto:dannyyounger at yahoo.com] 
> 
> The attendance rosters paint a very sad picture -- two 
> constituencies in particular (the ISPs and the NCUC) had no 
> member participation whatsoever in several working groups:
> 
> Registration Abuse Policies WG
> Inter-Registrar Transfers WG-A
> Inter-Registrar Transfers WG-B
> Community Communications Coordination WG
> 
> These two constituencies also had very limited attendance in 
> other working groups:
> 
> Policy Development Process WG
> Post Expiry Domain Name Recovery WG
> 
> Not listed in this report was participation data for some of 
> the newer working groups such as the Registrar Accreditation 
> Amendments WG and the Registrant Rights WG that similarly 
> have seen no active participation by members of these two 
> constituencies.
> 
> When some constituencies fail to participate at the working 
> group level it is almost inevitable that whatever 
> recommendations emerge will be skewed as a result of 
> imbalanced input -- clearly this is not a healthy situation.
> 
> On this list are many veterans of the ICANN process.  What 
> suggestions might you offer to improve this overall situation?
> 
> 
> 
>       
> 
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