Hi Roberto,
On Oct 19, 2009, at 6:40 PM, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
Bill,
This is going to be my last message on the subject. Although interesting, I
think that we should continue in Seoul, where in a F2F situation we will
reduce the risk for further miscommunication and misunderstandings.
Agreed
A few clarifications:
"But the main point for the SIC to maintain the concept of
constituency, against the open opposition of NCUC," which
sounded to me like you were saying the main point for the SIC
is to maintain the concept of constituency, against the open
opposition of NCUC. Sorry for my confusion.
The confusion arises, IMHO, from the fact that we use the word
"Constituency" to mean different things.
I mean "the body that, as is right now, has īnter alia the right to have
councillors in the GNSO Council". And, unless mistaken, the concept of
constituency as described is not what NCUC wants. And I do believe that the
NCUC has stated this openly.
Right, we suggest no hardwiring, but rather democratic elections (which in most plausible scenarios would yield the same results...unless you green lighted the CP80 censorship constituency, they might have trouble getting broad-based support). But so do you: you said "the SIC has decided, after long discussion, not to have an automatic link between creation of a constituency and establishment of a seat in the Council." So by your own definition above, this would mean you've decided constituencies will no longer exist. But this doesn't fit with you saying that the SIC was struggling to maintain the concept against the opposition of NCUC. How can you be agreeing with our position and at the same time working to overcome our position? I mean, I like a good oxymoron as much as anybody, but this makes my circuits fizz out.
Anyway, let's chalk it up to miscommunication and move on.
When you say that NCUC is in favour of "constituencies", you mean "the
bodies that are defined in the NCUC charter as being constituencies", which,
unless I am mistaken, have many rights but not the right of voting
councillors.
So, one way to progress is to say that that everybody is in favour of
"Constituencies", but that we need to come to an agreement to what will be
the exact "powers" of the constituencies.
Agreed. As far as I can tell, everyone sees the 'powers' fairly similarly, except that NCUC thinks council seats should be filled by elections, SIC thinks the EC should just hash out the allocation of seats (which to us sounds like a recipe for trench warfare), and some in ALAC feel there should be hard wiring. Hopefully we can have a focused discussion on the relative merits of these approaches and the trajectories/scenarios they may point to in order to move this to another level.
[...] (BTW, why did SIC ok RySG
eliminating constituencies in their charter? I never
understood the rationale for not having harmonized structures
across SGs, and it makes the misimpression about NCUC's
charter which explicitly provides for constituencies seem all
the more odd.)
I think I have explained this a zillion times, but I can say this for the
zillionth+1 time.
Not to me, sorry
One of the roles of the constituencies in the initial design of ICANN was to
provide a mechanism to define and register membership. This was addressing a
concern, which was to avoid capture by a group of people who were joining
the process in a category where they were not really qualified to be.
During the discussions related to the review, in the consultations with Ry
and Rar we realized that this risk was non-existent for them, because in the
way we had defined the SGs (i.e. as being the "Contracted Parties") we had
an automatic mechanism to sort out the issue: if the organization has a
contract with ICANN, it is in, otherwise it is out. And by virtue of this,
we also had a complete list of the membership.
This happened because during the process there was rough consensus by the
community (although I was personally against, having preferred a "Suppliers"
vs. "Consumers" approach) to have the "Contracted" vs. "Non-Contracted"
separation.
In the case of the non-contracted parties, we do not have such a mechanism.
Check, for instance, the discussion about the potential individual
registrants constituency, where one of the debates is how to sort out who is
a commercial and who is a non-commercial registrant, and how can we monitor
that the status at the moment of the registration is kept over time. Same
issue if we think about a business entity that is also an IP holder, how we
determine who is an internet service provider and who is not, etc. In simple
words, we do not have an easy mechanism to determine who is qualified and
who is not to join a SG. However, we have that for the constituencies, in
the way that constituencies are currently defined and chartered.
So, the proposal of the SIC (and the decision by the Board) has been that we
could get rid of the constituencies in the contractual house, but not in the
non-contractual house. You may agree or disagree with the decision, that has
been already taken by the Board and is not on the table for further
discussion, but this is the explanation of the rationale for it.
Ok, well thanks
Entirely separate from the principal of constituencies are two issues:
[...]
You make good points here. I am looking forward to discuss these, among
other things, in Seoul. I would like to keep this email short, addressing
just clarifications and potential misunderstandings.
I didn't characterize the SIC as bad and ugly. It is
unquestionably true though that the SIC imposed a solution
that was opposed by NCUC's 80 organizational and 87
individual members and a wide array of non- member supporters
and was supported by 3 people. If you don't like calling
this top down, ok, give me another term for something done by
the board over the strenuous opposition of the community in
question.
I'm not hung up on language, just facts.
Quite interestingly, I just read the email from Dominik Filipp, who agrees
with you that the SIC did not follow a bottom-up process.
However, what he objects on, is exactly the opposite: for him constituencies
should be not only created and approved, but should have voting power in the
council. The fact is that the bottom-up process is usually defined as
"taking the decision that suits me" ;>)
On a more serious vein, I invite everybody to take a step back and a deep
breath. We started this process years ago, with a council where the voting
ratio between non-commercial and commercial users was 1:3. The BGC before,
and the SIC[K] after the changes in the Board committee structure, have
analysed proposals, discussed with the community (all parts of the
community), gathered feedback, proposed a solution, presented the solution
to the different parts, rediscussed over and over again with all those who
were opposing it from different sides, repeated these iterations several
times, and arrived now at the final step where hopefully in a couple of
weeks we will have this historic change, and a GNSO Council where the
commercial and non-commercial communities are represented on a base of
parity.
In order to achieve this, it was necessary to go through an interim phase,
during which we had transitional charters, giving ourselves time to think
thoroughly the new composition and functioning of the SGs, but in a
situation in which we were progressing from the past, and established as a
matter of principle the parity between commercial and non-commercial.
I was prepared to hear the grumbling of the commercial users, noting that
they will be less represented than before, but I was incredibly astonished
by the fact that all what I am hearing is the bitching of the different
components of the non-commercial community, fighting bitterly for the
control of the additional seats, yelling and screaming at the SIC from
different sides, apparently forgetting completely that it was the BGC and
SIC who recommended in first place to have this new balance.
We all recognize and appreciate the rebalancing, admittedly more in principal than in practice. But 1) there's been a pretty fair bit of bitching from the CSG too, which inter alia you cited as a reason we ought to just suck it up and go along with the SIC charter, and 2) we're not fighting for control of seats, we're arguing the noncommercial space should be organized in a democratic manner that doesn't lock us in perpetuity into precisely the sort of dysfunctional competition you decry.
To be honest, if I had the chance to rewind the clock, over my dead body I
would have ever accepted the task to deal with this matter, and would have
much preferred to leave things as they were, raising my arms to show
powerlessness, and suggesting to have everybody getting together and achieve
consensus in a real "bottom-up way", and to come back to the Board when a
consensus was found. Anybody has a guess on where we would be now? My bet is
that we would still be with the old GNSO structure, as who likes the status
quo would have prevented any move.
Plenty of angst and frustration to go around, alas.
The bottom-up process is not a process by which the decision is taken by the
bottom, but a process in which the Board consults the community to the
maximum extent possible, takes idea and proposals from the community to the
maximum extent possible, but then makes a decision that does not necessarily
please everybody.
Unfortunately, the consultation, negotiation and compromise
didn't really involve NCUC.
What?!?
In Sydney alone the SIC had two official meetings with NCUC, plus the
discussions in the corridors, plus emails before and after. And even outside
the SIC, other Board members were involved. I know that neither you nor
Milton were there, but other NCUC folks, including the Chair, were there,
you can check with them.
I have, but let's not rehash the past at this point. What matters now is we sit and talk through the question of institutional design in a reasoned and depersonalized manner while bracketing all the other stuff that is not integral to it.
But we can still do that, and
very much look forward to working with you in Seoul and
beyond to arrive at a lasting solution that is supported by
the actually existing NC community.
I hope so.
Ditto. Cheers,
Bill