Re: [ICANN-EU] Horizontal organization

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@vitaminic.net>]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 18:24:21 +0200, you wrote:

>To me, reduction of crowding is less important than recruiting
>expertise.  I don't want to offend anyone, but I'm sure that there
>is quite a bit of expertise available from non-candidates; there are
>even candidates I wouldn't ever want to see in an advisory board.

I agree; but the "top N candidates" method was proposed as the "less worse"
temporary method I could think of, not as an ideal one.

>> One thing is to go to ICANN and say "Hi, we are a self-nominated
>> group of At Large members, here is our proposal", and another is
>> to say "Hi, we are a provenly representative subset of the At
>> Large community, here is our proposal". Ignoring us in the second
>> case would be more difficult, I think.
>
>Oh, you mean like in "We proposed ourselves as candidates, and got
>some endorsements due to quantum fluctuations.  BTW, we are not the
>candidates who made it onto the ballot."?  

When you get 20-50 votes in a list of 75 people, it seems difficult to me to
talk about "quantum fluctuations".

>On the other hand, some candidates putting together a pressure group
>which claims to have found the holy grail of wisdom, and starts
>excluding the @large public at the earliest moment possible, may in
>effect turn out not to be credible at all.

It was definitely not meant this way :)

>> However, I agree that the most open the drafting phase is, the
>> best would be the resulting proposal. So maybe we should have an
>> open discussion list for the proposal itself, and then have the
>> advisory council support it.
>
>This is more like what I was originally talking about.  However, the
>advisory council should consider itself to be a provisorial ad-hoc
>committee, without any superior legitimation, and without long-term
>legitimation.

Sure. It is clear that only ICANN can give a real legitimation to such a
council, and that since ICANN will work out an official way to structure the
community by next year, this council should expire by then. However, I think
that it is important to establish an unofficial European At Large Council
right now, because then it will be much more difficult not to have an
official one. There are people who would like to see the whole At Large
thing fail, and we will be much weaker if we are not organized, and if we
cannot show an effective way to manage our bottom-up consensus process.

>If you proceed like this, you'll always be able to say: "You had an
>opportunity to comment.  You didn't, so please don't whine about
>lack of consensus." This is, basically, what Andrew McLaughlin did
>about parts of the nomination process, when turning down part of the
>criticism from list members.

Ok - I must say that you convinced me about the opportunity to keep this as
open as possible. Let's say that we will have an open forum for general
discussion, a moderated announcements list, and open forums for specific
issues, such as a proposal to be submitted to ICANN about the At Large
membership structure. But I still see the need for a defined group to take
the role of "spinning wheel" of all this stuff, coordinate it (i.e. open new
forums, release documents, and so on) and make it run, and to constitute a
recognizable object that says "Hey, it was not the process of electing a guy
and leaving him there alone until his mandate expires and you can wipe us
away from the Board - there's a whole active community here."

What would you think about making an open call for members who would like to
be part of this council, and then closing it for the following months, while
keeping open the discussion on factive matters in the various sub-lists? And
what if you get 100 or 200 requests, or if you get 50 people from a single
organized group trying to takeover the council? Maybe, in such a scenario, a
big group would not even be necessary - maybe a few persons with well
defined roles could be enough. Maybe the very set of lists could already be
considered a "council". I don't know. I really want to get comments from as
many people as possible on this.
-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola     <vb@vitaminic.net>    Ph. +39 011 23381220
Vitaminic [The Music Evolution] - Vice President for Technology