[ICANN-EU] A first summary...

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

First of all, thanks to all the candidates for running, thanks to the members of this list for discussing, and congratulations to Andy for being elected.

I'll try to give a first summary of my personal impressions from the At Large election.  This may in part be unstructured or turn out to be wrong, but, anyway, let's try... 


Candidate endorsement process.
The one thing which made me initially suggest the icann-europe list was the fact that ICANN's nomination committee had filled five of the seven slots for candidates in the European region.  I didn't find this appropriate, and I still don't - in particular given the fact that other regions were handled differently. For the future, I'd suggest that all candidates must find the acceptance of a certain amount of at large members.  One could add a clause permitting the nomination committee to fill those places on the ballot for which no acceptable candidates were found.

(Note: It may quite well be the case that NomCom has actually worked in favor of the member-nominated candidates, by directing anti-nomcom votes to few individuals.  However, I don't believe this is the right way to vote for anyone.)

Candidate selection.
Who were the candidates, and who is the director?  I do believe that most of the candidates who finally made it onto the ballot would be able to do a good job on the board in terms of arguing, and surviving.  However, would all of these candidates represent "the internet at large" in any reasonable sense?  I don't think this is clear.

Look, for instance, at the Asian/Pacific region.  The "At Large" BoD member elected in that region is a member of the DNSO Names Council, sent there by the business constituency.  When I first read that, I thought "this must be a bad joke".  It isn't. I do hope that he'll do the steps Roberto Gaetano announced back then in the nomination period for himself: Step back from the DNSO GA's chair (in this case, from NC), and concentrate on the At Large seat on BoD.

These examples, however, do show a very fundamental problem in net.politics: Whereever you look, you see the same faces. Obviously, some of these people will be able to represent different interests. Others will stick to a certain point of view or group of interest, despite running for a mandate somewhere.  You don't know before.

In the future, rules should be introduced which at least prevent double mandates in multiple constituencies/SOs or constituencies/SOs and the At Large.  ICANN rules should mandate that an At Large director who is in the names council (or has some other offici al position in one of the supporting organizations) steps back from the latter mandate.

Also, the supporting organizations or their constituencies should have the decency to keep their hands out of the At Large elections, and neither endorse candidates there, nor (in the person of some official) run for mandate in the At Large.

There should be a clear commitment from candidates that, for the time of their presence on the BoD on behalf of the At Large, they will concentrate their ICANN-related activities on that BoD seat.

The nomination committee should, in addition, have looked closer at the interests and points of view represented by candidates.  Even in the European region, there have been interesting personalities with whom it was not at all clear that they would represent the point of view of "the Internet at large".

Net.publicity
I'm confining this to the European region.  Here, the first thing which can be noted is that most European At Large members are German.  This is clearly related to the fact that in Germany, there was extensive media coverage, in particular by spiegel.de (the online appearance of the respected magazine Der Spiegel) and heise.de (the online appearance of the publishing house of Heinz Heise; in particular, c't, one of the most important offline computer magazines in Germany, is published by them). Additionally, at least some offline newspapers (including the highly respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) had occasional coverage of the ICANN election.

From the messages on icann-europe, there was no such extensive coverage of the election in other European countries, with devastating effects on membership applications.

What does this tell?  The traditional online media such as Usenet or mailing lists are stepping back behind publishing houses' online appearances.  As grotesque as this may sound, the ICANN elections may mark the point at which offline media are taking over the opinion-building process online.

This impression is also mirrored by the outcome of the election: It's most likely not an incident that the one candidate with extensive offline media coverage was elected into the board.  Andy is well known from TV interviews whenever some hacking occurs, CCC is legendary anyway, and he even had a (really nice!) interview in c't just in the election week - on internet content control, and together with the internet spokesman of Germany's largest oppositional party.

The icann-europe mailing list was Hanno's and my humble attempt to compensate for the total lack of a European online community.  While the list is certainly a valuable ressource, and may play a role in the future, we failed in creating a European online community. (ICANN didn't even try, though.)

There are different explications for this: On the one hand, icann-europe was first announced on few, and specific mailing lists (which explains a certain bias in the initial membership).

On the other hand, it's existence was published on most of the important ICANN-related web sites - without much effect on membership.  This may indicate that there is no interest by the majority of the At Large public in participation in such a list.

What does this mean for the future?  On the one hand, we may blame ICANN for not publishing the existence of this list (or setting it up themselves, in the first place).  On the other hand, we may also draw the conclusion that the direct and consensus-driven approach of mailing lists doesn't scale to the orders of magnitude the At Large is evolving towards.  This may imply that we should head for the model of representative democracy, which has proven to scale quite well.  Andy's intention to get the traditional users' and interest groups involved with ICANN implicitly goes into that direction.

Finally, we may just note that everyone has the opportunity to participate, so nobody should complain. We would continue to work with what we have, and look what happens. That what I'd suggest for the moment.

Additionally, we should try to work on creating a European online community.  While, personally, I'm prefering mailing lists as the online discussion medium of choice, we may wish to explore the creation of a forum similar to slashdot.org or kuro5hin.org.



Please note that all this is my personal view of things.  Please feel free to flame, comment, or ignore this message at your option.

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