Charter drafts - and the related process so far => NCUC/ALAC

[William Drake]

I fired off a comment as well during last night's dreary council
meeting.  Awakening this morning to see the net effects, it's clear
that the responses submitted were overwhelmingly favorable to our
position.  Not that this necessarily will mean anything to the SIC/
staff.  Unfortunately, most comments dwelt more on the procedural
aspect of SIC/staff discarding our work without comment or dialogue
rather than on precisely why their alternative will not work.  We've
made those points before but they've never responded, so it might have
been good if more of us had reiterated them and demanded specific
explanations.  The official NCUC response http://forum.icann.org/lists/gnso-stakeholder-charters/msg00061.html
  goes some way in this direction, but whether this one intervention
will yield reasoned replies in the staff synthesis or beyond---I
wouldn't put money on it.  The board will make its decision soon and I
suspect that they'll stick with the SIC approach rather than doing a
180 turn just because the little people who will have to live with
their charter don't like it.

One thing that I found particularly depressing in the comments was the
ALAC leadership's decision to endorse the SIC/staff version, and to
dismiss NCUC's model as some sort of capture strategy on the part of
an apparently evil cabal (that's us, I guess).  The former is despite
the fact that ALAC earlier disavowed the CP80 proposal, which the SIC/
staff version actually mirrors in important respects.  Go ahead and
figure that one out.  It is notable too that this is despite the fact
that ALAC leadership has not sought any sort of dialogue with NCUC to
arrive at a shared understanding of the alternative models, and
despite the lack of any real dialogue within ALAC on the relative
merits of the two models geared to eliciting a broadly supported
verdict.  I have feet in both worlds as an NCUC councilor and a member
of Euralo's board, and I at least did not see any effort from the top
to seriously canvass ALAC members opinions before arriving at a stance
in our names.  All I have seen on the ALAC lists and other lists like
that of the Media Democracy Coalition has been messages to the effect
that civil society people should work in the first instance through
ALAC, not NCUC or NCSG.  And yet the board has said it thinks at large
structures should be active in the future NCSG, and we get criticized
for somehow failing to include more ALS folks in our work, when of
course from our side they're perfectly welcome and just don't choose
to engage.

Maybe I'm still a bit green (although after almost a year here this
excuse is getting lame) but I simply fail to understand why people
can't see that ALAC and NCUC/NCSG have different and non-competing
functions and should be cross-pollinating and cooperating closely.
Whatever stuff went on in the past between whomever just doesn't cut
it as an excuse for continuing dysfunctionality today.  Indeed, when
we have tried to collaborate of late, as with the IRT, it has been
clear that there's often quite a bit of overlap/harmony of view on
substantive matters.  So it's hard not to conclude that this is all
about turf, personal empires, and interpersonal relations, which is
just adolescent and nuts.

In any event, once the board has given us the charter and we've
decided how to respond, undertaking a serious NCUC/ALAC dialogue
should be high on the list of priorities, in my view.  It just doesn't
work to have one group actively undermining the other when both could
be working toward common objectives.

Best,

Bill



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William J. Drake
Senior Associate
Centre for International Governance
Graduate Institute of International and
   Development Studies
Geneva, Switzerland
william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch
www.graduateinstitute.ch/cig/drake.html
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