Great message Milton, comments below ..

> In my mind, ICANN is a governance institution and therefore its task is to
> formulate policies and rules that bring a constructive order to a fairly
> narrow area of Internet activity (domain names).

And numbers, don't forget the last N of ICANN, that space is going to
get very interesting as people start making money with the leftover
and trade of unused/underutilized IPv4 space.

> ICANN is not, or should not be, an evangelical Church with a missionary wing
> that views enlarging its membership as an inherently good thing. ICANN
> should stick to its narrow, technical policy mission.

Amen.

> To express my view in the simplest way, I don’t think ICANN, Inc. should be
> doing, or should be actively managing, popular “outreach.” I think the
> appropriate level of participation and recruiting should be driven by the
> external people who have a stake in what ICANN does.

Amen 2.

> ICANN should concentrate on those things as a priority, not on some blind
> rush to “get more people involved.”
>
> At best, getting more people involved in a flawed structure is useless
> because the newcomers quickly learn that the process is dysfunctional or
> their efforts have no impact, and they leave. At worst, “getting more people
> involved” becomes a way for the Corporation staff to recruit malleable
> drones who can be used to undermine or bypass the real stakeholders.

Amen 3, regular mortals don't care a bit, or even a byte about what
ICANN is or does and those who get convinced run when they realize
what a waste of their time is and how their contribution gets washed
and ignored due the chicken farm politiks.

> Note that ICANN Inc. is currently paralyzing new constituency formation in
> NCSG because it won’t approve a charter that was approved overwhelmingly by
> its noncommercial participants.

Amen 4, some farmers are getting smarter and speaking for themselves,
that's not good for the ones making fortunes selling the eggs.

> Note that this report proposes to use the South Summer School on Internet
> Governance (SSIG) as a “recruiting” tool. This bothers me. Currently, these
> wonderful summer schools conceived by Kleinwachter are autonomous
> institutions. They already educate and sometimes get people interested
> enough to get involved. If we make them tools or arms of the GNSO, via ICANN
> funding or pushing ICANN recruiting efforts, their independence is lost, and
> so is most of their value.

Amen 5, and that became part of the ICANN ecosystem, where for some of
the medium-old ICANNites plays well to give them more exposure, more
clout, increased prestige in the ecosystem, a space for propaganda and
to be frank a nice source of income.

> I repeat my main premise: insofar as ICANN’s activities actually have an
> impact on people’s lives, and it gives those impacted people meaningful
> forms of influence over what it does, THEY WILL PARTICIPATE, you will not
> need an “outreach” program. Investing major amounts of time and money in
> “outreach” instead of in fixing ICANN’s representation and accountability is
> a big mistake, a diversion.

Amen 6, I think I just became a devote member of Pastor Mueller's
Church of Internet Governance, in ICANN parlance PMCOIG.

Cheers
Jorge