[NCUC-EC] New member applications Dec. 2013

[William Drake]

Hi

On Dec 30, 2013, at 7:59 PM, Milan, Stefania <Stefania.Milan at EUI.eu> wrote:

> Received. Any procedure here? Shall we do a quick search about them or...?


At least as long as I’ve been around, NCUC’s been quite liberal about accepting membership applications, and since we moved to the SG structure a few years ago the NCSG EC's review has probably served to increase the comfort level with this since there’s already been a vetting.  So the EC should be attentive, but there is no need for any action unless someone notices something that merits discussion.

On Dec 30, 2013, at 10:15 PM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> Not sure about its current status, but when the NCUC charter was first drafted we were a bit concerned about being “invaded” by ISOC chapters who might (I repeat, “might”) act like the Progressive Labor Party in SDS* or the LaRouchies or something. So we had some special provisions in there about limits on the number of memberships to chapters of the same organization. I don’t have time to check if that is still part of the charter,

I don’t see any language like that in the 2009 revision, but I may be failing to fully deconstruct deep legislative historical meanings.. 

> but as the number of chapter-members grows, I do think it is something we need to pay attention to

Attempted invasions, alien or otherwise, would I guess fall into the category of 'something that merits discussion.’  On the other hand, one could argue that the growth and diversification of NCUC’s membership of late makes this less of a worry than it was in the early years.  Moreover, there are other and perhaps more tasty spaces in the ICANNsphere to inhabit these days.

A less demanding possibility is the appearance of disruptive, high volume individuals that engage in trollish or ideologically or interpersonally divisive behavior.  Or who fancy themselves semi-journalists and spend their time cultivating and then ‘reporting’ on a community’s warts etc.  We’ve seen a lot of these and related behaviors in recent months in other Internet governance spaces, and I’d hate to see this sort of misanthropic crap here. We just had someone try to subscribe to the membership list who’s not a member and has been raging against ICANN and its inhabitants elsewhere (we’re all dupes of imperialism, etc).  While often such personalities eventually get bored and go away if nobody responds to them, until then they can  burn down social capital and turn people off on participating.  I’m of course not advocating censoring views or imposing speech codes, and NCUC has survived some rough patches without resorting to such. But if someone’s objectively abusive to the point of causing significant disruption, perhaps there should be some defined procedures for redress as with other listservs or advocacy networks.  Whether one would want procedures for filtering at the front end as well, I don’t know… "pre-crime" policing of who can join would be a rather uncomfortable activity for a civil liberties/human rights-oriented CS network to engage in.  In any event, the bylaws don’t specify the grounds on which an EC could say no to an individual applicant, and pretty much anyone can claim they're "concerned with the public-interest aspects of domain name policy. ”  On the other hand, they also don’t preclude some discretion when needed.  

If we’re going to revise the bylaws as has been advocated, it might be worth at least discussing whether to somehow codify the EC’s ability to protect the ‘local’ public interest if necessary.   One would hate to see this or a future EC forced into a position where it had to decide something and there was nothing written anywhere giving it a legitimizing basis to do so.  That could open up many cans of worms, and we could end up like some other IG groups/lists we all know that are at war with themselves over accountability, transparency, and rule of law.

Gee, what a cheery note to end the year on…

Happy holiday!

Bill


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-ec/attachments/20131231/f5358b6c/attachment.html>