Milton Mueller wrote:
> Any subgroup of academics that wants to issue a statement is able to
> do so at any time. There is no need to create additional
> organizational overhead. The Stakeholder Group can accommodate any ad
> hoc formation of a group of any kind. So, no need for a new
> constituency, and let's never confuse having a formal organization
> with having a meaningful voice, the two are quite distinct.

Milton was very persuasive on this point when the NCSG was forced by the 
Board/staff to use a constituency model instead of a single group with 
individual and group members which was the preferred option for the majority 
of the members at the time. Few of the academic members seemed to see the 
point of an academic constituency once the surrent charter was adopted and 
studied and explained. If a significant numbers of representatives of HE 
institutions as registrants of domain names (in .edu, .ac.<countrycode>, 
.<countrycode> etc) were to join NCSG as the non-profit ones are entitled to 
do, I would think, then they might form an HE institutions constituency and 
many of the internet-governance-researcher academics (from law, CS, IS and 
other disciplines) might also joint that but that would be a separate issue 
to dividing the working academics from other non-commercial users into a 
pointless overhead of maintaining a formal constituency.

Of course any non-profit HE institution which wished to join as an 
organisation would probably fit within NPOC anyway.


-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/