Re: [ga] Proposal: New Cross-constituency mailing list

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

George Kirikos wrote:

> That's part of the "noise" -- there is no chair to this list,  and the
> handful of people who've been pretending there is one (perhaps they
> don't have a Nintendo Wii to play with or an Sony Playstation) have
> been adding to the noise.

When I try to use electronic games, I lose... badly.

My take on this is this: that a forum dies when any consensus 
(consensi?) that are formed will have no future but to be ignored.

ICANN replaced both the elections for directors and the GA with the 
ALAC.  That cut the roots and the vines withered.

It is no wonder that the ALAC is also a withered vine, kept alive only 
through the infusion of ICANN money: the ALAC is a body that is provides 
no method through which ordinary internet users can reasonably believe 
that their points of view will be considered, much less that they might 
have an effect.  The closest historical model for the ALAC is the old 
system of village soviets, regional soviets, and supreme soviet that 
were such Potemkin village of faux-democracy in the old Soviet Union.

There are good people in the ALAC - Roberto, Vittorio are really fine 
people.  But they would have much more perceived authority had they 
obtained their voices through a process in which there is a direct path 
between internet users and the choice of people to fill their positions. 
 The current system has so many layers and dilutions that internet 
users feel that it gives them about as much control as they would have 
using a strand of limp string to push a bowling ball up a steep mountain.

That's why people left the GA - ICANN removed its pathway into the heart 
of ICANN.  And no new forum, absent that pathway, will achieve vibrancy 
and will be dead on arrival.

		--karl--