[gnso-consensus-wg] Replies to various posts
I have been trying to get some real work done today, do I hope that you will forgive my replying to a number of message at one time. At 23/07/2008 08:00 AM, Gomes, Chuck wrote: My understanding is that the At-Large is really not looking for a voting seat in the GNSO because that might negatively impact the need for their existence as an advisory body. Alan - is my understanding correct? Chuck Chuck, you are definitely correct. Although ALAC will hopefully be acting as a placeholder in organizing future at-large participation in the NCSG and as a catalyst to get such participation going, this future participation would not be directly related to the ALAC, or the ICANN At-Large organization composed of RALOs and ALSs. Of course some ALSs may participate on their own, just as many ALSs are (and started out as) ISOC Chapters. We would expect some councillors to be from these new constituencies within the NCSG, but it would be premature to establish the count prior to these constituencies coming into existence. At 23/07/2008 12:18 PM, philip.sheppard@xxxxxx wrote: >>3. Each House will determine its own representation > > CG: If my memory is correct, there were at least two members of our > group who expressed the viewpoint that we need to determine the numbers > before we can finalize the overall proposal. If we accept that > position, then it seems to me that the houses would need to determine > its own representation by tomorrow. If so, is that feasible? PS Lets go for the rages option.I propose range of 661 - 991 for usershouse I find myself arguing against my cause here, but if we are even considering a house with 19 councillors, it is already the same size as the entire council in the BGC proposal and larger than the entire council on the Joint users proposal. Add in even a modest 7 person Registry/Registrar house, and we are at 26. Before the Chair. If the R-R house matches users 1 for 1, we have a 38 person council. If they do not, we have a situation where both houses have equal voting power, but in terms of speaking power, the user side would dominate the discussions (even if we simply go round-robin). I do not see how we can live with anything more than a 2:1 ratio between the houses, and even that is probably too high. At 23/07/2008 12:59 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote: While I share your rejection of Avri's wholly invented concept that appointment by the Nomcom somehow gives people a special relationship to advancing "the public interest," I do agree that they are independent of the constituencies. If ever there were a need for independence of the constituencies it is in the chair position. I see no terrible inconsistency between a Nomcom appointed chair and BC's position on Nomcom generally. As a NomCom appointee (to the ALAC), I have a severe problem with "Avri's wholly invented concept that..." The NomCom claims that it's major criteria is to support ICANN's Core value 4 - Seeking and supporting broad, informed participation reflecting the functional, geographic, and cultural diversity of the Internet at all levels of policy development and decision-making. I think that "the public interest" is a reasonable abbreviation of this, and not quite a concept invented by Avri (or perhaps in the unlikely case that she had not read any of those documents, she is to be commended for inventing it independently. At 23/07/2008 01:06 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote: Chuck, if all you mean is that statements issuing from constituencies have to document who supports them within a constituency we don't have a disagreement.But it's not hard to get a representative sample of a population of 9 registries. The problem is not even remotely comparable to determining whether an entire SG adequately represents some broad class of actor like "commercial entities." I asked you to name a standard for doing that. You didn't. I suggest that you can't. I suggest that, short of a global electoral voting process, no one can. I think that we are focusing on the wrong issue here. I agree with Milton that we cannot come up with objective standards to prove that any group with more than a handful of constituents (with a lower case "c") properly represents the entire group. This is the case for commercial users, non-commercial users and registrars. And it will be true for registries once large numbers of new GTLDs come into existence. All we can reasonably do is ensure that the SGs have rules and processes in place to try to ensure that all legitimate members of their constituencies (again, lower case "c") can participate in the SG. That means that as new groups with specific points of view coalesce, they are given a fair opportunity to participate in GNSO activities, and to have their ideas presented without being filtered by the current dominant players within the GNSO. Possible examples in each of the four SGs could be Domainers, Consumer advocates, Registries focusing on geographic or language-specific TLDs and Registrars operating in developing countries. In each case, I think a case could be made that the current Constituencies may not adequately represent their specific interests and they want to be at the table (and perhaps the Council table as well, seat count being an obvious constraint). The challenge is to find words that capture this requirement succinctly. For the record, the words in the Current By-Laws are "Each Constituency identified in <http://www.icann.org/en/general/bylaws.htm#X-5.1>paragraph 1 of this Section shall maintain its recognition, and thus its ability to select GNSO Council representatives, only so long as it in fact represents the interests globally of the stakeholder communities it purports to represent, and shall operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner and consistent with procedures designed to ensure fairness." At 23/07/2008 02:15 PM, Gomes, Chuck wrote: Two of the three people who have represented the RyC on the NomCom were in our meeting today so I asked them to share their comfort level with a couple of the options we considered. Both were uncomfortable with the NomCom selecting a chair for the Council but they were less uncomfortable with the NomCom providing a slate of candidates from which the Council could elect a chair. At the same time, as has already been mentioned by several in this group, there would be a loss of confidentiality of NomCom candidates if we went that route. This is an important issue. We have been talking as if we can "instruct" NomCom to take specific actions, because we feel it is in our best interests. But the NomCom has a wider set of requirements and constraints than we do. I would really suggest that for things like the Chair position, we state our requirements (perhaps an independent chair, not affiliated with any SG, skilled at running meetings and organizing activities, and familiar with GNSO issues and processes - a list of requirements that we need to define even if it IS the NomCom that selects). We can also say that we think that the NomCom is a fine body to make this selection, but I don't think that we can mandate it. Another issue we have not at all touched on is the selection of GNSO appointees TO the NomCom. This will surely need to change with the new model. Alan |