Re: [ICANN-EU] European At Large Council

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@vitaminic.net>]

On Sun, 03 Sep 2000 22:53:28 CEST, you wrote:

>>	- How do we avoid the group being taken over, flooded, or accused
>>	  not to be representative?
>It will not have as a target to be representative, and will therefore not be 
>able to "speak on behalf of the Membership".

But then, it will be possibly useless. If it's not representative, why
should its voice be kept into account by ICANN or by the Director? It would
be the same if each of us wrote down a statement and got some signatures on
it by other At Large members.

I think that these elections are giving us some strength, that could as well
be used for the purpose of strengthening the whole community. If we decide
not to use it, we are losing it forever. And what about all "wasted" votes?
I am getting messages that say "We are supporting you since you are the best
of the Italian candidates, but we are very disappointed about the procedure,
and we feel that our vote will be wasted, since Italy will not be able to
get a voice." This, I fear, is what is happening everywhere outside Germany
- and while we all think that nationality should not count, we all can see
that this election has become just a sum of national elections, and there's
nothing we can do about this but recognize it and act accordingly.
Otherwise, next time I think that we will have even less voters from outside
Germany, and even more voters from Germany, and so on until the Director
will be weakened since other countries' members will not accept him as their
fairly elected representative in ICANN.

My opinion is that it would be a huge error if all this process, in which 74
candidates tried to reach and move hundreds of At Large members and get
their vote, produced in the end just an open, crowded and noisy mailing list
(such as this one would become when extended to all At Large members - it's
already crowded now). I do want to have it, to create as many forums in as
many languages as possible (we already have a French mail forum and lots of
German Web forums, by the way), and to involve all the community, but it is
not enough, and if we lose this occasion to raise our level of legitimation,
we are scoring a goal to ourselves.

>In practical terms, as has been already noted, the GA mechanism of two lists 
>can be proposed.

But how many subscribers are there? Are there 20'000 persons on the open
list?

>On top of that, it is obvious to me that we will have in a pretty natural 
>way some other lists, that will either have a "geographic" focus (and also 
>the capability of attracting members that are not comfortable with English) 
>or a "subject" focus (sort of Working Groups on issues that will become 
>relevant).

This is also unavoidable, and this will also weaken furtherly the strength
of this "open list" we want to establish. Imagine that on this list a
proposal is discussed, and consensus is reached. Then we bring it to ICANN,
and someone else pops up and says "Hey! We, on the French (Spanish,
Italian...) list, reached consensus on the very opposite!" What should ICANN
do? They will possibly decide that At Large members cannot express a clear
position, and will do as they like. And even if the Director chooses one of
the two positions, he will be weakened by the fact that there are structured
groups of At Large members claiming that he is going against the will of the
community.

Since I'm quite sure that we are going to have at least five or ten "open At
Large lists" in different languages and communities, there must be some way
to coordinate them all and get to a consensus shared *among* the
communities. This is another reason to have a more formally structured
council.
-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola     <vb@vitaminic.net>    Ph. +39 011 23381220
Vitaminic [The Music Evolution] - Vice President for Technology