Re: [ICANN-EU] European At Large Council

[Thomas Roessler <roessler@does-not-exist.org>]

On 2000-09-05 22:05:30 +0200, Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> Yes, but we need to start from somewhere. This is a good occasion
> to claim the legitimacy of such an organization. An open mailing
> list is only representative of its subscribers.

That's obvious.  Just as obvious as the fact that the at large
membership is only representative for itself, and not for the
general home user.

However, it does not change the basic problem: How to get a
reasonable sample of the interested public involved with the
process.  ICANN has this problem with membership implementation, and
we have the same problem on another scale with getting a suitable
sample of members involved in discussions, and consensus-finding.

> It is not clear to me, also, what kind of role do you see for
> such "council". If you think that it would be a group of persons
> sharing more or less the same point of view, and willing to
> organize to defend it, then I understand the value of an open
> list. If you think that it should be the place where different
> opinions in the communities confront and try to get to a final
> consensus (a thing that in some occasions could also prove
> impossible), then a structured council, with elected members and
> so on, will be more suited. 

A structured council may possibly be the right tool at some point in
the future, though I don't believe this.  However, before anyone
tries to implement that council, the value of an open list as a tool
for finding rough consensus should be evaluated by experiment.

A council will still be able to emerge from that list.

> Democracy also means that, sometimes, there will be a majority
> and a minority, and you must have a way to determine and measure
> them. You might call this "formality", but there's no shortcut
> around it (you know, democracy is a slow and ineffective
> instrument of government, but it's the best we have).

This is only true if you have to come to a yes-no decision.

However, measuring majorities and minorities is not that necessary
if all you need to find is a solution everyone can live with. Also,
it's not that necessary if the most important point is to get all
arguments mentioned, and the actual decision is made elsewhere.

Put into more drastic words, we shouldn't believe that the power of
the European at large council (or whatever this will end in) is
large enough to make elections and votes necessary.  Rather, we
should be glad if we can produce well-argued input for those who
actually make the decisions.

> I agree on this in principle, but I fear there is the risk of
> expanding the scope too much and too suddenly, and losing focus.

Agreed.

> However, if you want to express user positions about such wide
> and general issues, either you are the "European Internet Users
> Parliament" (and you have a way to legitimate yourself as that),
> or you will simply look as a bunch of people affected by
> megalomania.

Aren't all the self-nominated candidates suffering from some degree
of megalomania? ;-))

>>One of my main questions to constructively building such a thing
>>is in what european countries there are what
>>(user-)organizations that could help?

> While I understand what you are thinking about, I cannot see why
> At Large members should call for any kind of external help to
> structure themselves. It would be a bit strange to me if we
> decided to discard the results of these elections, in which At
> Large members are expressing their preferences about some
> charters and some candidates, and then have some external people
> from other organizations come in and represent the community.

Getting user organizations involved doesn't have to imply that you
discard the election's results.  However, it can bring more points
of view into the game, and eventually lead to a richer general
picture.  I don't consider that a bad thing.

> And by the way, I fear that some of the so called "user
> organizations" in many countries have strict connections to
> real-life political parties and movements, that I'd like to keep
> out of this matter.

This seems to be regionally different.

-- 
Thomas Roessler                         <roessler@does-not-exist.org>