[governance] ICANN stumbling on a hornet nest

[Milton L Mueller]

Adam,
The distractions associated with running a members election are miniscule compared to the vast amount of money ICANN spent, and spends, on the At Large Advisory Committee. And don't forget the substantial amount of time, money and energy that is dumped into At Large by volunteers in the Regional At Large Organizations (RALOs). The ALAC and RALOs are jokes, with mostly dead mailing lists dominated in discussion by a handful of people, perhaps a dozen at most. There are some very good individuals in ALAC and in RALOs, who contribute greatly to policy making and to ICANN, but their participation could just as easily be channeled into ICANN the way the GNSO does it, through working groups.  

What At Large is NOT is an accountability mechanism - which is what the whole ICANN members/voting system was supposed to be. When creating ICANN, everyone involved (except, of course, for the people who were helicoptered onto the interim Board) thought it was absolutely crazy to create a powerful global institution without a membership to which the organization could be held accountable. 

If you look at California public benefit corporation law, it is all about how these corporations should be held accountable to their members. The current form of At Large was devised as an ESCAPE from that. 

The idea that At large is a form of global participation and (more importantly) global accountability is just not defensible; many of the people in ALAC, far from holding the Board accountable, are trying very hard to get onto the board and are very interested in ingratiating themselves to the Board and to GAC. Their incentives are to rise up the organizational ladder, not to keep ICANN accountable.

The point about voting is that it gives each individual the right to express _their own_ preference, and it makes that preference count, in the aggregate, in a very clearly measured way. The organizational pyramid that Alejandro helped to create, in contrast, pretends that 3 people represent an entire world region - and one of those people is not even selected by people in that region, but by a Nominating Committee which the ALAC itself selects! 

Alejandro's contrast of the admitted but fixable flaws of an election does not include any real analysis of the very obvious and fundamentally unfixable flaws in an organizational pyramid scheme that is the At Large. 

--MM


> -----Original Message-----
> From: apeake at gmail.com [mailto:apeake at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Adam
> Peake
> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 2:40 AM
> To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> Subject: Re: [governance] ICANN stumbling on a hornet nest
> 
> Anyone interested in some history of the at large election might look here:
> 
> A one page summary
> <http://web.archive.org/web/20030627132419/http://www.naisproject.org/
> report/final/010907abstract.shtml>
> 
> and reports:
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20030621172016/http://www.naisproject.org/r
> eport/final/execsummaryA4.pdf
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20030621172016/http://www.naisproject.org/r
> eport/final/naisreportUSLetter.pdf
> 
> At the time, I thought the problems were fixable and ICANN should have
> tried a second round, a lot of the problems would not have been hard
> to fix.  Now I'm much less sure, I think an annual election would be a
> massive distraction for the organization and volunteers who already
> have too little time.  But should not be discounted.  A new study as a
> new ATRT round starts might be useful.
> 
> Adam


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