[ga] Vittorio Bertola on the At-Large

[Danny Younger <dannyyounger@xxxxxxxxx>]

Excerpt from comments of Vittorio Bertola in "A draft for ALAC comment on ICANN Strategic Plan" 

http://forum.icann.org/mail-archive/alac/pdfqaxb5Jde3O.pdf

3. On AtLarge

While ALAC is just starting its own internal review and therefore it is too early to make conclusive statements at this stage, we are concerned about the current state of AtLarge in its Outreach and policy involvement as described in the Strategic Plan. As mentioned above, individual users are not professionals in ICANN?s area of business.  No ALAC members, for example, receive any compensation for the time they spend for ICANN activities, unlike employees or management of TLD operators or registrars or ISPs whose ICANN involvement is part and parcel of their business.

Yet, as the Figure 4 Identified Objectives from ICANN Stakeholders on page 15 illustrates, only AtLarge communities have relevance to all 11 issues in the table; while government, technical community and gTLD have 10, ccTLD have 7 and Address community have 5. This means, while AtLarge is made up by voluntary or pro bono individuals, they have to deal with more issues than any other constituency.

AtLarge is distributed geographically, and the current ALAC has three members from each of the five ICANN regions; with only one staff for all, it is no question that the input or impact of AtLarge is severely limited, resulting in scattered, shallow activities, mostly due to nonsystematical activity by individual volunteers. Due to several factors, there is yet little interaction among ALS members, and also between ALS and ALAC members. Of course it is primarily ALAC?s own responsibility, and we are struggling to find the right way to exit from this situation; however, in doing so we cannot exclude the possibility of reaching the conclusion that the current ALS/RALO/ALAC framework may not take off, and that the present mechanisms for input and participation by the general public into ICANN policy making processes ? the ALAC and the GNSO NCUC ? are too burdensome and powerless to actually motivate a reasonable number of institutions and individuals to participate actively and
 regularly in the long term.

The assumption at the roots of the current AtLarge framework as designed in the last ICANN reform was to expect individual users to selforganize, bottomup, to participate in ICANN?s activities. Skepticism did exist at that time whether sufficient amount of real interest from individual users would mount to the visible and active level or not. We need to revisit this point seriously, and we may need to ask the following question: Does ICANN need At Large and public participation into its policy development process? And, if so, how?

We believe that ICANN needs a strong and direct participation by a conspicuous number of active Internet users, as well as broader interaction with the global Internet users community. We believe this to be the only viable way to ensure that the resources that ICANN is tasked to manage will not be captured by the specific interests of any country, company or constituency, without involving the traditional governmental frameworks used in the preInternet era.

We will continue to be involved with this consultation process and try to be as constructive as possible, despite some negative or critical tones we showed above. We thank you for your attention and patience.


		
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