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 *********************************************************** William J. Drake Senior Associate Centre for International Governance Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva, Switzerland [log in to unmask] www.graduateinstitute.ch/cig/drake.html ***********************************************************