[alac] Meeting ISOC-ECC.

[Thomas Roessler <roessler-mobile@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I met with Patrick vande Walle of isoc.lu and ISOC-ECC today in
order to discuss some aspects of a possible RALO.

He argued very strongly in favor of what I'd call the council model
in which you don't go by individual membership numbers and the like,
but by organizations -- pretty much the opposite of what many (with
some notable exceptions) seemed to prefer in Berlin.  With this
model, you'd have to be relatively restrictive about the
organizations which are permitted to join a regional at-large
organization, in order to avoid capture and other manipulations.
You couldn't guarantee democratic principles such as an equal weight
for all individuals (think about overlap).

However, and that was vande Walle's main point, you have a scheme
which is practical when most individual users don't want to be
bothered with details.

Of course, this structure isn't unknown: It's the same approach some
of the constituencies successfully use in order to claim that they
are speaking on behalf of, say, thousands or millions of businesses.

Ultimately, the questions all this poses is where you put your
priorities: Democratical principles even when people aren't
interested -- or practicable advocacy with the risk to get out of
touch with the actual users?

Greetings from Luxembourg,
-- 
Thomas Roessler                         <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>