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
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www.graduateinstitute.ch/cig/drake.html
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