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