ALAC/At-Large Policy and Planning One Day No. 04
Cairo ICANN Meeting – Part 1
(Held November 02, 2008)
Legend
Name: First name of member of group
Name L: First name plus first initial of last name if there's more than one person with the same first name.
Name?: If we think we might know who's speaking but aren't 100% sure.
Male: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a male.
Female: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a female.
Name: 52 - 0.31.06 We will identify a foreign language in square brackets with a time code for the beginning and end, so that you can quickly identify those passages. At the top of the transcript, we will advise you of the name(s) of the foreign languages you'll need to search for. For example, some transcripts may contain German, so you'll have to search for “[German” instead of “[French” to find all the passages. The speaker identification is the same convention as all the others. i.e. If we know the speaker's name we'll include it, otherwise we'll put a question mark after it, or if we can't even guess, then Male, Female or SP.
Translator. If translator actually translates French or German for a participant we will note it as “Translator”. It will normally be evident from the dialogue who the translator is translating for. If not, we will include a note in square brackets with respect to who they are translating for.
********************************************************************************************************
List of Participants
Important Note: Please note that this should not be considered to be an "official" list of the attendees. This is just a list of the participants that we were able to identify during the transcription. There may have been others present that didn't speak and some people may have participated that were not on the official list of attendees published on the internet.
Aguirre, Carlos
Aizu, Izumi
Alvestrand, Harald (ALAC Review WG)
Ashton-Hart, Nick (ICANN Staff)
Bachollet, Sébastien
Bertola, Vittorio (ALAC Review WG)
Brendler, Beau
Budhrani, Pavan
Diakite, Hawa
Drakes, Tricia (ALAC Review WG)
El Bashir, Mohamed
Greenberg, Alan
Guerra, Robert
Jackson, Colin (Westlake)
Kleinwächter, Wolfgang
Langdon-Orr, Cheryl (ALAC Chair)
Langenegger, Matthias (ICANN Staff)
Leibovitch, Evan
Linton, Andy (Westlake)
Lorenzoni, Marco (ALAC Review WG)
Ludwig, Wolf
Morris, Jacqueline
Muehlberg, Annette
Narten, Thomas (ALAC Review WG)
Nguyen Thu Hue
Peake, Adam
Salgueiro, José Ovidio
Samuels, Carlton
Scartezini, Vanda
Seltzer, Wendy
Seye Sylla, Fatimata
Sharry, Patrick (ALAC Review WG)
Subrenat, Jean-Jacques (ALAC Review WG)
Taiuru, Karaitiana
Thompson, Darlene
Vande Walle, Patrick
Vansnick, Rudi
Xue Hong
********************************************************************************************************
Male: Okay?
Cheryl: Well, if it’s dodgy, what…
Translator: And can you hear us now, ma’am?
Cheryl: Yeah. Now I can hear, so I apologize.
Translator: Sorry, we’re on channel 2.
Cheryl: I was on channel 2, it’s just that this was disconnected and I couldn’t…
Translator: Oh, I see. I see. Fine.
Cheryl: Thank you. Sorry, Carlos.
Translator: The need… There’s a need from my point of view in our region to speak and discuss participation on the agenda at one point or another. We believe that this is an aspect that needs to be discussed and how we can improve the participation. This is one point which is essential for us. Thank you, ma’am.
Cheryl: Thank you, Carlos. We have a dedicated space on our next session after our OneDay workshop to look at exactly that matter. I’d like to think that it will grow from the discussions and free flow of information today, that we will come to not just firm agreements, but by the time we get to our Wednesday meeting we will have established a set of criteria, a set of accountabilities, and a set of knowledge by everyone who is taking a role – liaison, representative, or otherwise – what the expectations are for them in the next 12 months and how that will be measured.
Part of that is also working very hard – and this is very much the business for today – to see how we can better enable our At-Large Structures to have a proper and effective feed into not just the RALO activities, but those of the ALS, and of course directly to ICANN. Much of what we did yesterday in our summit planning was focussing on that particular point, and when I call for a report on yesterday’s activities, I believe Latin American and the Caribbean Regional At-Large Organization will be greatly comforted by where we are heading in that area.
Carlton, go ahead.
Carlton: Just a point of clarification – the agenda on the board doesn’t seem to the be the one that I’m picking up from the wiki. If you go to the top, I see a link to “Paris meeting.” I don’t see a “Paris meeting” link on my lot here 02.35. Top.
Female: Top. inaudible
Carlton: It left?
Female: laughter
Female: No. It’s recently been…
Cheryl: Do we have a problem or don’t we have a problem?
Carlton: I’m not seeing a lot of that stuff on my lot here 02.59, so I’m wondering if…
Cheryl: Okay. Carlton, if you like, what I will do is ensure that…
Nick: inaudible
Cheryl: Okay, Nick is answering inaudible 03.08. I was just going to say that I was just going to send someone around to find exactly where you need to be on your laptop.
Nick: On atlarge.icann.org, our homepage, there’s a link to the Cairo schedule.
Carlton: That’s the one I went to.
Nick: I’m not quite sure how you got to Paris, but I’ll come look at your computer.
Cheryl: So going back to that Carlton, we’ll just make sure that you do have the right thing in front of you. Yes, go ahead, Robert.
Robert: Just related to the question, in case there’s some newcomers to this room, just to say that there is a Skype channel, so if you’re running Skype on your computer… And for issues like this, I’ve just pasted the URL into the Skype channel. And so if you want to make some comments informally to people in the room while discussion’s taking place, there’s this open Skype channel. So if you’re not added to it, please let someone who is there just add you. Thank you.
Cheryl: Just following on from that, to facilitate remote participation, we will be running an Adobe Acrobat Connect meeting room throughout all of the Cairo meeting, and I would highly encourage you to do exactly what is being done in the screen in front of you, which is to raise questions and run chat in that space as well, because certainly perhaps not today but later on in the week that’s a method that some of our ALSes can also simply join us with. I certainly know that the executive director of my ALS is planning on – in inverted commas – “joining” some of our meetings using this modality.
One of the best things, if I do not notice you waving your hand to say, “I desperately wish to speak to this matter,” is to use the Skype channel known as “At-Large Summit Conversation,” or indeed the Connect Pro meeting chat, either of which I will notice hopefully – if not, one of our vice chairs will notice it for me – and say, “Hands up.” It simply means that I will put you in the speaking queue.
Any other points on the agenda? pause Okay.
At 9:30 this morning we will be joined by some guests. Very important guests in as much as they hold our future in their hands. From 9:30 till the morning tea break today, we will have the opportunity to have a discussion with the ALAC Review Committee. This is the working group under the auspices of the Board Governance Committee that have undertaken the review of the At-Large Advisory Committee and who have published their mid-point review documentation in the last week to 10 days – which I’m sure they will apologize for it being so close to this meeting. But in the last week to 10 days, that has been public.
Those of who were with us yesterday were encouraged and reminded that we are not having a presentation on the ALAC review, we are having a discussion about the ALAC review today. We have a rare opportunity to discuss with the working group what I like to refer to as the devil of the details. Many of the recommendations, which we will be going through today, look wonderful – or not, depending on your point of view. But how these are to be implemented, how they are to work within our structure, and most importantly how on earth a group of volunteers is going to manage some of these activities and accountabilities is a very, very important piece of today’s work activities. Some of these suggestions are fine from a corporate governance point of view, but I’m not sure which of you is going to give up your full-time employment to manage to keep up with them. laughter
We need to make the next version of the At-Large Advisory Committee and of course the structures, RALO and ALSes, that are where the information comes from to develop our opinion on policy – it’s not 15 people in a room deciding they know what’s right for the world of internet users and registrants, it’s the thousands and thousands of members of the At-Large Structures who should be having that opportunity. Our role, however, is to facilitate outreach, to expand our ALS structures into areas of the globe which are not currently covered, and yet still to come up with real policy feedback and information in a time manner. To do that and to also have the strategic planning requirements and the accountability framework requirements that some of the recommendations are indicating might be asked of us is something we need to discuss very carefully.
So I’m a little confused as to where we’re going to be putting our guests. There will be some – what? – half a dozen people joining us soon, Nick?
Nick: Yes.
Cheryl: I find this particular set-up quite disturbing. What are we going to do? Line them up across the front like a shooting gallery, or what?
Male: inaudible 08.48
Cheryl: Seriously, where are we putting these people?
Nick: We’re going to have to use remote mics and move some chairs alongside over here.
Cheryl: Okay. Well, I’m…
Male: inaudible 09.01
Cheryl: Yes, go ahead, Robert.
Robert: I think what Nick was saying is that there are some mics towards the back of the room. There might be some chairs there as well. I think that’s a way that they can get translated. I think whatever they say would be good that it’s on the record and gets translated. Secondly, that way they could see us so they can interact with us. If they were to the front, you know, it’s probably… I think that’s kind of what happened in Paris – they were at the front of the room and we were seeing them. It’s not ideal, I agree with you, but I think it’s an important discussion to have with them.
The other question to do I guess when they come is to find out how long they can stay.
Cheryl: That’s not a question. It’s not a matter of how long they can stay, they are here until morning tea, and if our discussions continue into morning tea, it is only us that will be sacrificing our caffeine and nicotine addictions.
Female: inaudible 09.54
Male: inaudible
Cheryl: The morning break’s on the schedule. Through to 11. Okay?
So are there any particular points or issues that in your reading of the mid-point review paper from the At-Large Advisory Committee Review Working Group that you would like now for us to note to begin our agenda discussions on when they have arrived? Is there some questions that we need to look at immediately?
Go ahead, Evan.
Evan: Sorry, this is Evan. I’m just asking if there’s an online link to the document.
Cheryl: I believe it’s amongst the documents for the meetings today.
Nick?: Yes.
Cheryl: Can we bring up that link? pause Is it possible for that document to be put into the online Adobe room space?
Nick: Find like a PDF of it or something, yes.
Cheryl: Okay. I think it would be good so people can switch between screens.
I have made the assumption that despite the fact we’ve all been busy tying up our working lives to get to this meeting that most of you if not all of you have read this document. Am I in error in that assumption? If I’m not in error in that assumption, then I would like to hear from the assembly what particular points on what particular recommendations we would like to begin our discussions with the working group. pause Deathly silence. pause Okay. pause
Thank you, Robert.
Robert: I think… You know, a point that’s mentioned in the review document I think that’s useful to see where people stand is the issue on the voting rights, that in the ALAC review originally did not envision for ALAC that has now slightly been changed. And I’m just curious what the consensus of the group is on ICANN… or, sorry, the ALAC actually having voting rights on the Board. Thank you.
Cheryl: Just to clarify, we’re talking about what was the old Recommendation 4 in the original report, which was suggesting that the At-Large Advisory Committee does not have other than its current non-voting liaison relationship with the Board. In its I think quite sensible wisdom, the Board Governance Committee Working Group has decided that was simply wrong and their proposal – note it is a proposal for discussion – is now that there will be not one but two voting seats allocated for At-Large Advisory Committee direct representation on the Board.
I would have thought we would be hearing cries of joy from most people involved in this committee. Have we all just read that and gone, “Oh, well, good, fine”? Go ahead.
Robert: Yeah. I just wanted first to raise… to make sure that people knew of that significant change, and number two, related to that, because it does envision two votes, not one, then that would also change our processes in that we would have to have an election for the two as opposed to the one. And so that envisions, you know, additional work that we have to do should that be accepted. I am, you know, quite delightful that…
laughter
Robert: …additional voting has been given, however I’m disappointed that the number does not say that it will increase over time. The number of ALAC voting is still substantially lower than what ALAC had at the beginning, and so that is of concern. There are many groups in North America, the region I’m in, and this was an issue of big contention many years ago and there are many… I cannot speak on behalf of them, but I know that I’ve had a lot of private e-mail saying that until, you know, a majority or very large percentage of the vote… This is a good step and I think it’s very useful. I think, you know, we need to have a consensus view from the group, what we think about this. I think this is something that no doubt will come in the discussions during the week and if we want this step in the right direction to go forward, substantial lobbying and encouragement of this group to the Board would need to be done. I think it would also be good to get the Board liaison kind of briefing or update on this specific issue in terms of where the discussions are at the Board at this and how we could play to at least make this happen and build on it for the future. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Robert. I do have Sébastien on the speaking list, but I’ll ask if Wendy wants to respond first if you don’t mind, Sébastien. Go ahead, Wendy.
Wendy: This report has not yet come to the Board for discussion, but since the GNSO review and NomCom review also have considerations of the Board and Board composition, I think that would be an appropriate time to begin bringing in ALAC’s interest. And the Board review as well has just released an initial report and so there certainly is opportunity to consider and to take into account the ALAC’s views in support I expect of voting Board seats.
Cheryl: Thank you, Wendy. Sébastien?
Sébastien: Thank you, Cheryl. The questions by the voting two members of the board, it’s a little bit difficult to discuss this like that in one report coming from the review of the ALAC, and it’s one of the reasons I am a little bit uncomfortable with this unparallel review of the different bodies of ICANN – Nominating Committee, GNSO, ALAC, and the Board and so on and so forth. And I would like to be sure that we have a big picture, because if it’s two Board members amongst three, it could be great. If it’s two against 35, it’s something different. And we have to know the results of the others yet and it will take time to see where we are going.
At the same time, I am not sure personally that it is a better position to have elected members than to have one liaison because, as Robert said, we are coming from… the story of all that, it’s quite interesting. It was supposed to be nine seats at the Board for the same type of people we are representing here, and then it finally gets five elected in each region directly, and then no one, and now two. What is the rationale for that? And if I have to say something, we can say yes, it’s better than the previous situation, but what as ALAC we would like to have as the situation, and my feeling is that it could be better to have one per region, end users, and that’s within the Board and ALAC will have its whole 18.33 duty to organize those elections and that could be better than just to have two. But two is better than no one.
But I think we need to see where we would like to go and not to say, “Yes! Two, great,” and it’s done. No. “Yes, we got two. That’s better, but that’s not the end of the trip.” Thank you.
Cheryl: Just on that point, of course we are looking only three years down the track to our next review point. I would not want to put words in the committee’s mouth, but I suspect that the answer will be “Start with two and see what happens in the next review.” Certainly I think we should not look what I think is a gift horse in the mouth – having two voting Board members from this constituency is something that I heard very loud and very clear that the majority of this community indeed wanted. It is in fact not my personal preference and I happen to personally disagree with it. That didn’t stop me as your chair fighting tooth and nail to get it. Having got two, we need to make it the best two possible.
In terms of your process issue, we really need to look at is this going to be an alternate year, in which case it’s only an annual election but with two-year appointments? How the process goes is something that we certainly need to work on, but we have the opportunity to respond to this document and I don’t think that we should just say, “Thank you for the two,” we should say, “We are delighted but our intention is to prove this so worthwhile that we head back to in our next review point a serious consideration of regional representation modelling going into At-Large community input directly to the Board.” So it’s not saying, “Thank you, you have placated us,” but “We’d like to see this grow and develop.”
Go ahead, Izumi.
Izumi: Yeah. Generally speaking, I agree with what Cheryl said. Maybe the details are a little different. What I read is that a Board member will be seated next year and then another one for the next year. It sounds like staggering. But how about bringing them two at the same time first – one can have a shorter term. That’s sort of details, but I’m aware that there’s some other communities inaudible 21.14 within ICANN, that they they really don’t like any of us to be on the Board, so we need to effectively campaign. It’s not a done deal at all, it’s not given. And also at the same time, we better perhaps argue more voices, but as you said, that we may revisit the distribution of the regions and the RALO structure itself – how does it really work?
By the way, I put other 21.43 comments on the wiki for your reference.
Cheryl: Thank you, Izumi. I have Adam and then I have Beau. Go ahead.
Adam: Hi. It’s Adam. First question is this is a member’s meeting and I’m not a member. Is it okay for me to speak?
Cheryl: As you will be a member at the end of this week, most certainly. But today is a OneDay workshop which is open and the RALO representatives are more than welcome to be part of it, so go for it, Adam.
Adam: Alright. I wondered if there were consideration given to other ways of representing the At-Large interest at the Board. For example, mirroring the GAC’s representation where advice… if you go to the bylaws, advice has to be taken into consideration and acted upon, and if it’s not, then reasons given have to be provided. And I wonder if that is actually more valuable than two Board seats where people have… those Board members, those directors have a fiduciary responsibility to the Board, not to the ALAC. So Board members are not representatives of the ALAC. Once they get to the Board, they act as individuals. So if we really want someone to carry our water, to carry the message of the At-Large community to Board and to the community, then it seems to me that the most powerful organ in this whole structure is actually the GAC, and it is not the SOs and it is not those two Board members, and I wondered if that consideration had been given to this. And apologies, I’m new to this so that was my thought.
Cheryl: Thank you, Adam. And in fact, it’s a bizarre moment when I see some three months down the track someone channelling pretty much what I was saying when we were having this debate in Paris, and that is the reasoning behind my disagreement with the voting position on the Board. That has been something discussed. It was not the majority view, and it is certainly the views of the majority that have influenced the Board Governance Committee’s Working Group on this review to literally turn over a recommendation by the independent consultant. But do I hear what you’re saying? Personally, absolutely. But that was not the majority view and it certainly did not make the major influence.
I have Beau and then I have Carlton.
Male: And Robert.
Cheryl: And Robert, sorry. In that order.
Beau: Yeah. Just wanted to say I’m pretty happy about it, pretty excited about it, and I think it’ll make a fairly big difference in trying to talk to some of the groups who I have to deal with, to help them think about, you know, the validity of where the ALAC maybe going. I was curious, though, not to derail the discussion, but Cheryl, I was agreeing with a lot of what you were saying but at one point you said, you know, you fought tooth and nail for this although you didn’t agree with it. I’d be curious as to what part of it you didn’t agree with as far as it relates to the issue of user representation. Do you think this actually means less or more, or what? I’d be interested to know. Thank you.
Cheryl: Happy to take this offline in greater detail, but the synopsis is – and it does follow on from the points Adam was making – I see more power in not having the requirement to act in the best interests of the entity in the governance of ICANN as a Board member. But I’m happy to expand ad nauseam on that.
Carlton, Robert, and then Alan.
Carlton: I am… I remember this position because I thought it was sensible. If the philosophy of the Board does not change, then the only way voting as a constituency makes sense is if the voting is balanced, if there is some balance of power on the Board. The argument was, and I believe it all depends on the philosophy of the Board, if you believe that people are called to the Board to represent the institutional interests as opposed to the sectoral interest, then having seats on the Board doesn’t really matter because it’s not the sectoral interest at all that is paramount, it is the institutional interest.
I also had that same position. The other thinking that I had was that I did not hear anything about expansion of the Board, the numbers on the Board. And if this was going to go forward concurrently with an expansion of the Board, I could see it making some significant difference. So I personally believe it’s a wash.
Cheryl: Sorry, Robert and then Alan.
Robert: I’ll say two points. I think just getting to your first question in terms of key points for discussion, there’s a lot of points for discussion that are actually related to this Board one. I want to focus on number 4 which is “Educating and engaging ALSes.” My concern is that, you know, let’s take as an assumption that the two Board seats is a reality, one of the biggest challenges that a lot of ALAC members and ALSes mention is the availability of time. You know, the Board liaison position or Board position takes up a big chunk of time. If now we have to resource two people to actually do that and they vote, which means they have to really not only liaise but they actually have to do more, and we have that one person that does that in a very dedicated fashion, finding two is going to be a challenge. And so if those two people come through, they’re going to require (a) either a lot of time, or (2) a lot of support from ALAC resources and from the ALAC as a whole. You know, it may put burdens on us. So I’m still supportive, but I’m just saying that some of the other points for discussion that relate to education, engagement, costing, particularly strategic vision I think is important because if we do get these two, then our long-term plans, our long-term discussions are going to be more important and those points in the ALAC review should also be discussed. Thank you.
Cheryl: I do have a speaking order which now is Alan and Carlton, but our visiting guests have arrived and I would very much like to have them around this table rather than sitting in either the firing squad system or otherwise. So at this point I would like any regional At-Large representative to take a back seat and see how many people we can get around. Sorry, you’re just going to have to move from the table and go back. Sorry, you can leave your laptops there. You won’t be missed out. We do have a roving mic. laughter Please, if… Patrick, can you assure me that all of your working group people have a seat at this table?
Nick?: Cheryl… inaudible 29.17
Cheryl: Okay. Trisha’s there, that’s fine. Patrick, who else have you got to come? We have Vittorio, we have… I just want to know how many seats to free up.
Patrick S?: Yeah. I’m not… I think we might have inaudible 29.34.
Cheryl: Umm-hmm.
Patrick S?: Umm…
Cheryl: Okay.
Patrick S?: I think just Thomas is here.
Vanda?: Thomas has come.
Cheryl: Ah, okay.
Patrick S?: So… overtalking
Cheryl: Alright.
Patrick S?: Two more.
Cheryl: Okay.
Vanda?: Two more, okay.
Cheryl: Welcome, Thomas. If you just grab any seat that I’ve just moved somebody out of… laughter I think we now have one spare seat and that’s going to work out, Patrick, correct? If I have Trisha here and then a seat over there, that’s everybody?
Nick?: You’ve got one now.
Cheryl: Okay? Got one now? Okay, great. And Sébastien, come to the table, sir. I will not have a vice chair of the ALAC sitting in the back rows. laughter
Going back to our speaking order, thank you very much to the working group for joining us. We will obviously wait a few more moments before we begin our formal interchange, until the chair of that working group arrives. But if you don’t mind, we have been discussing the interesting issues and some of the recommendations on your mid-point paper, and the current speaking – in response to our discussion, so you’re coming in a little bit in the middle of things here – is Alan and Carlos. So Alan, go ahead.
Alan: Actually, my point is one of the ones that I think there’s going to be a substantial discussion with the group, so I’ll pass at this point until it comes up at that point.
Cheryl: Carlos? pause Perhaps I should just remind those visitors who have joined us that unless they are fluent in Spanish and French, they will require the interpretation tools of the headset, and I do know that you are about to need to understand Spanish. If you are an English speaker, use channel 1, if you are a Spanish… Say again. If you are an English speaker, use channel 2; if you are a Spanish speaker, use channel 1; and if you wish to hear the interpretation in French, please use channel 3.
Vanda?: inaudible
Sébastien: French – 31.39
Translator: Channel 3 for French and for Spanish, channel 1. English will be on 2.
Cheryl: Thank you, Carlos. Go ahead.
Carlos: Okay.
Translator: First of all, the interpretation. We’re talking about spaces and things like that, so of course it’s rather difficult to understand it being a specialized language. So while agreeing with everything that has been said by Sébastien, Carlton, and Robert, it seems to me that the figure… two, two persons seems very interesting in number, to be on the Board. I would have preferred one per region, as Sébastien said of course. But if we were to look into the philosophy of what Carlton said, when ICANN speaks of its principles, its spirit, its philosophy of the multistakeholderism as a philosophy, we’re talking about different sectors… of the participation of different sectors. The participation of different sectors, if it’s not egalitarian, if it’s not the same participation, we are breaking away from the multistakeholderism. In the same way, if we do not bear in mind and pay attention to the different countries and languages, we are leaving people out and if we’re doing that, we’re not sticking to multistakeholderism.
We also have to look at the policy established and developed by ICANN in the joint partners agreement. It seems to me that the main idea or assumption is to incorporate and approve and by so doing having a better internet. I believe that this is a point that has to be taken into account. We… when speak of law, in law, have the intention of dealing with the users, the consumers, through protective legislation that protect their rights, the rights of a fair generation 35.12. These rights of intent, resume, to achieve what we are not doing today, the participation of the users finally in ICANN. Thank you very much.
Cheryl: Thank you, Carlos. Izumi?
Izumi: Two points. First, to answer with what Adam said, I think the working group report describes somehow about the need for the ALAC’s advice to be recognized more formally from the Board process. And also it was quite clearly written with the personal comment of Avri, the GNSO chair. I don’t think the having two Board seats and the recognition or mechanism to formally deal with advice made from ALAC are mutually exclusive. They can go together. However, I have a little bit… tiny concern about saying five, or one Board seat from each region. When we actually – I was involved – designed the first At-Large in 1999, there were 9 Board seats if you remember out of 18 for At-Large, of which 5 were designated per region – one from each region – and 4 we designed it, we agreed that global, irrespective the region. I don’t think that all 36.56 issues here we discuss or the Board have to deal with or ICANN has to deal have every time geographic or cultural elements as a central element. They can be different people from different regions can agree with or those people within the same region cannot agree within. So there’s a danger when you go too much region-centric thinking and operation, that we may need some wisdom there.
Cheryl: Thank you, Izumi. Just in response to something I’ve made a note of – we are capturing, and I’m sure both Marie-Helénè and Matthias will continue to capture – some of what we are discussing here of course will be substantive to the development of our ALAC response to this paper, and Izumi, I think the historical context very much belongs in that space. We went over history I think quite vigorously in Paris and whilst we do not wish to discount history, we have a moving forward with the suggestion of a two-vote position from ALAC onto the Board. We certainly have already discussed – and I’m reiterating here simply to bring the working group members who’ve come in midpoint on our discussion – that in an ideal world at our next review point we would think that the work we have done and the representation has been so good at the Board by our two members that we could look towards a reassessment and development of some wider form of representation. But the purpose of today is very much to discuss with the working group, while they’re having the very rare time of us and them just in this room, with their mid-point, and it is “discussion” paper. So whilst I do not wish to cut back any conversation, I will come down relatively hard and relatively quickly on revisiting of old business. This is a new business agenda – how do we and how do we believe our regions and ALSes respond to the recommendations in this paper.
I’m really also filibusting until the chair of your working group arrives. I know Patrick has hopped off to find Trish, but I obviously don’t want to go too much further into the meaty parts of the discussion before she’s had the chance to both introduce the paper that we’re discussing here this morning and of course introduce each and every one of you.
Because I’m an opportunist, and a shameless one at that, what I’m going to do is take the time we have now perhaps to ask each of the Board Governance Committee ALAC Review Working Group members to introduce themselves because you have people who have never met you before and we’d like to know, seeing as you have our future in your hands, exactly who you are, where are you coming from, and what would you like to say to us. And we’ll start there, please.
Harald: I don’t know how much information you want out of each of us. My name Harald Alvestrand. I’ve been on the Board for a whole year now. And my background is in standards-making for the internet, or that’s what got me here. In particular, I’ve been an ITF participant since 1991. So I don’t want to say anything about my particular opinions on the review, but we’re here to figure out what the community thinks is best for the community. We’re not here to impose our opinions.
Cheryl: Well, thank you. Patrick, I’m quite sure everyone should know who you are, but perhaps just a moment to refresh my memory, because I’ve forgotten you.
Patrick S: Thank you, Cheryl. Patrick Sharry. I’ve been supporting the working group in a sort of staff capacity during its work for the last few months.
Male: inaudible 41.08
Cheryl: laughter
Thomas: Yeah. And I’m Thomas Narten. I’m the ITF liaison to the Board, and I have been a somewhat familiar face here. I’ve been coming to the ALAC meetings for better than a year now.
Cheryl: He almost belongs to us. laughter We’re working the logistics. Please go ahead.
Marco: Okay. Marco Lorenzoni. I just came to the organization as Director of Organizational Review, so I did not participate to the great job that has been in so far to the working group, but very much looking forward to contribute.
Female: Jean-Jacques?
Jean-Jacques: Jean-Jacques Subrenat… overtalking 41.44
Translator: Jean-Jacques Subrenat.
Jean-Jacques: …group. I’ve been on the Board for one year – same duration as Harald. And I’m very glad to be on this working group.
I’d just like to point out one or two things. The first is that the working group would make it strongly known that at this stage we are not in the business of providing guidance or suggestions. We are in a listening phase. Our duty is to make the best we can of the independent review. And in doing that, we thought it was our duty to go beyond just an analysis. We have preferences, we have expressed some of them. So this is before you and now we are expecting the community – that is you – to give us your advice on what is workable, what is advisable. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you very much. And someone who ought not need introduction, but I am going to ask to introduce himself, one of the prior chairs and founders of the At-Large movement and indeed very much somebody who’s made the ALAC Version 1 roll over into ALAC Version 2 and is now instrumental in what we believe is going to be an exciting Version 3. Vittorio, please go ahead.
Vittorio: Well, I’m Vittorio Bertola. I think you already said everything, so… laughter Well, anyway, I’m the former chair and Board liaison of the ALAC and one of the people who founded it years ago.
Cheryl: I’ve been informed by Patrick that Tricia has been delayed, so we will continue on. She is going to be here with us shortly. And in terms of listening mode, one thing you’ll never be short of is people making their opinions known around the table at an At-Large meeting. What we are not going to do, however, is go around this room totally and say, “Hello, my name is Cheryl and I come from Sydney.” Most of us have nametags in front of us. Some of that will be confusing, because I’ve switched people to the back from the Regional At-Large Organizations. Apparently, you’re Sébastien, Thomas – you might want to just turn that around so I don’t get confused. And what we will ask you to do, however, is just to introduce yourself each time you speak because we are using translations and what people are hearing is the translator’s voice, and they won’t know that it’s my dulcet tones as opposed to Carlos’s dulcet tones. So each time you speak, please just say, “Hello, my name is…” and then it becomes part of the transcript.
So to begin without the beginning, which of course will happen when Tricia arrives, we were mid-flight when you joined us this morning about – I guess you won’t be surprised – talking about the proposal for a voting representation on the Board. Patrick, you’re shocked, obviously, that we started with that one. We’re happy to take this in whatever order of dialogue is most comfortable for you, but if you’re in listening mode, shall we continue with that or do you want to start at the beginning and move through? Go ahead, Patrick.
Patrick S: No, Tricia, as a number of the working group members have said…
Cheryl: laughter I’m not Tricia.
Patrick S: Sorry, you’re not. Cheryl. As we’ve said and a number of the working group members have said, we’re in listening mode, so we’re very happy to take any comments in any order that you believe would be most appropriate.
Cheryl: Okay, thank you. Well, what I might do then is ask if there is any more comments, or indeed I will indulge, because we are waiting for Trish, to have a short repetition on some of what has been said before. I now have a speaking order of Carlos… of Alan, you jumped in, okay. laughter I was going to do Robert and Alan.
Robert?: I don’t care which order.
Cheryl: Carlos, Alan, Robert, and then Hawa.
Female: And Sébastien.
Cheryl: And Sébastien.
Female: And inaudible. I’ve raised my hand.
Cheryl: The blind woman can’t see that without her glasses you see. And would you prefer to be before or after.
Sébastien: I’d like to make maybe a point of order.
Cheryl: You would like to enter that now? Please go ahead.
Sébastien: I think it’s… I know that you are in listening mode, but you write this paper. Some of us read it, some of us didn’t read it in depth. Maybe it could be interesting to know what are the main points you would like us to take and to discuss, because perhaps you are… there are some points you are not comfortable or you are too comfortable with, and as a reverse, I think it could be a little bit better if we can know what are the two, three, four main points that we would like to discuss. We start with one, if we spend the hour with this one I doubt that we fulfil our duty. And I just want to say that I would like to discuss the question of the liaison with the other bodies of ICANN at one moment during this discussion. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Sébastien. Might I suggest that as a point of order that is a most appropriate question to raise when the chair of the working group arrives, because I believe it would be her normal course to do exactly that introduction. So that’s on notice and we will revisit that again.
Carlos, go ahead.
Carlton: I’m curious. I notice… To me it’s the 900-pound elephant in the room, but nobody mentions it. If the objective is to influence the Board, can somebody tell me when an ALAC position has influenced a Board decision? Can somebody tell me that? I would like to see it and I’d like to know. Tell me when.
Cheryl: Sébastien, do you wish to respond to that or was I going to…
Carlton?: No.
Cheryl: …put somebody from the Board in the hot seat, which I’m happy to do?
Carlton: Other than the summit. Other than the summit thing.
Cheryl: Okay.
Carlton: overtalking 47.50 …other than… Other than the summit, now.
Cheryl: Okay. In which case, Thomas, you’re most used to us. Perhaps you can take that question.
Male: I think that’s an appropriate…
Thomas: Yeah. So, I mean, that’s a hard one to answer without thinking a little bit carefully, because my sense is the Board has been influenced by discussions that have taken place within the Board where ALAC positions are discussed and, you know, either from the liaison and also from other people. So the notion that, you know, ALAC or the liaison has no influence on the Board I think is simply false.
But what I would… At the risk of turning this in a different direction, I mean, one of the things that I would be careful about is assuming that influencing the Board is the real goal of everything, because if you have to resort to influencing the Board, the Board gets involved at the end stage of almost everything, when sort of the process isn’t working and they’re asked to resolve disputes that were not resolved at an earlier point in time. At that point the stakes are very high across the Board and it’s very hard to get any position sort of done 48.54. And the focus really on having influence is earlier in the process where it’s easier to actually influence the actual outcome.
Cheryl: Thank you for that very…
Carlton: I’m glad you answered that way, because then it goes back to my… I’m coming right back around to it. If that is the position, I make the point that whether you have two Board seats or not, it’s a wash. That was my point – it’s a wash. So if that is the case, if the main position is not to get to the Board but to influence things before it gets to the Board, will somebody then tell me where I’m wrong in saying it’s a wash about… this discussion about the Board seats?
Alan: I’ll tell him when it’s my turn.
Cheryl: I was going to say Alan is happy to take that up when he comes around, so you know my total biases. I’m not going to argue against your position – it sits perfectly with mine, but that’s not my place here. So let’s move to Robert.
Robert: Yeah. I just have… I had earlier mentioned when we started the discussion this morning about your report, what were some of the key topics that we thought were worth discussing, and I had raised the issue of the two voting seats is a significant change from the consultation report that came out in Paris. And so I said it was great that change had been made, that it addressed a longstanding concern, but did not address the issue that ALAC had started with nine seats and it’s been reduced. So we’re happy to get it back.
That you’re here now, I just want to emphasize maybe two points that I have not mentioned earlier that I think is important for us to get some comment on. One is point number 4, which is “Education and engaging…” That’s particularly important this week for us because we just had a discussion yesterday on the summit planning, and one of our priorities in terms of how to allocate the time schedule and things that we want to do there relate to specific issues, and there were some differences across regions as to what some of the priorities were. And so taking that into consideration to our summit planning I think is important. My belief has always been that there’s a lot thrown at the At-Large… I mean, “At-Large” as both the ALAC reps and the larger communities that feed into this process, and I think that we underrepresent users, and focussing it on education and engagement I think is particularly important if we think strategically and long-term. And I think… I’m putting that as one of the key goals. What may be missing are metrics related to education and engagement and seeing how we’re accomplishing that and what are things that could be done to improve that I think would be good to particularly add.
And also point number 11 is rather interesting, which is emphasizing that ALAC is the sole place where the user voice is put in. There have been at different constituencies others saying that they speak for users. Some registrars say they speak for users. There’s the NCUC that has user or… a user constituency as well. And so I think that will be a problematic one when it comes up for discussion in the forums.
So seeing they’re ones that haven’t been mentioned before, I’m curious to get maybe some comments from you as to how that will play. So on particularly point 11 which is, is there any language now in the existing documents that say that ALAC is the sole place that can say that we’re representing users, and if that’s a significant change, how would that play out? So I’m just curious on your comments or your views on that. Thank you.
Cheryl: And Patrick is willing to take that. Go ahead, Patrick.
Patrick S: Just very briefly, just to report that we had what I think was a very productive session with the GNSO yesterday where that point 11 was part of the conversation, and there was real willingness there to find a way that we might all move forward. There is in fact a meeting on Tuesday – I think it’s at 1 o’clock from memory – when that will be a further point of discussion. And I just reinforce your point that this will be a point of active discussion in the community, and that’s great, but that’s why we put it out there, to get reaction.
Cheryl: Thank you. I have Alan, I have Harald, I have Fatimata, and then I have Evan, which we will need the remote mic for. Thank you. And Izumi.
Alan: I missed the first part of this discussion before the working group came, so I may be repeating some of what was said before. Very quick intro, I was quite pleased overall with the report. I have three major concerns, two of which I brought up yesterday at the GNSO meeting so they’re not quite new, and one that was not brought up there. The issues are the Board, concept of user, and language. I’ll talk about the Board now and then get back in the queue for the other ones as we evolve.
I’m one of the people who strongly support voting Board members. When I see a lot of the other supporting organizations lining up to give up their vote in lieu of liaisons because they’re better, I’ll reconsider.
laughter
Alan: I haven’t seen a large line-up at that queue, in that line recently, however.
However, I’m very concerned about the wording in the interim report on how these people might be selected. If indeed there is an interest in doing the selection at the lower levels of At-Large – be it ALSes or even RALOs – without really involving heavily the ALAC, I see this not as, you know, “Is it equal to a liaison or is it better than a liaison?” it’s much worse than a liaison because then suddenly we’re in a position where there’s a complete disconnect. If you look at the other Board members that are selected, such as from the GNSO… Now they’re not there representing the GNSO, they’re not there passing on the words, but they’re selected by the GNSO as people who the GNSO believes understand the issues, have experience with it, perhaps they’re of like mind in at least some of the cases. If we have a situation where the At-Large Board members are selected by other parts of the organization perhaps with vested interests, perhaps as a beauty contest, perhaps based on numbers of “How many ALSes can we recruit quickly?” we’re going back to gaming, we’re going back to a situation where there could be a complete 100% disconnect between the Board members and the At-Large, the organization which ICANN is charging with carrying out the movement of user issues into ICANN, and I see that as potentially exceedingly dangerous. If you can’t trust the people who have been selected largely by the regions, then why are you bothering to put them there and why are we bothering to have meeting and get 56.23 work.
So I feel very strongly on that one and it could be a real minus if it’s done wrong. And I know there are people who say, “We want to go back to voting by At-Large, we want to go back to grassroots.” Fine, but that’s without ALAC and you might as well rethink the whole organization at the same time. So I’ll go back to my other subjects. If you can put me back in the queue when we’re talking about other subjects, I’ll go ahead there.
Cheryl: We’ll keep revisiting, Alan, because I can see the list.
Fatimata, please, go ahead.
Fatimata: Merci, Cheryl…
Translator: Thank you, Cheryl. I wanted to link the various points and decisions which we have acquired during the last meeting with AFRALO on the review of ALAC.
Now concerning the seats voting on the Board, AFRALO supports the idea of having seats voting in the Board. Now as to the participation, particularly those of the ALSes, we have already raised the question of how can we have the ALSes participate in this review and express their opinion. Tricia had suggested then to try to see how we could carry out an investigation to have their opinion and to incorporate it in the study. And of course, it was too late to have it ready for Cairo but it’s feasible between Cairo and the forthcoming meeting in Mexico.
Another viewpoint which we had discussed was the number of members who’ve been appointed in the ALAC, and some of the regions were against the idea of having members appointed. In Africa with support the country 58.40 because we do not have the resources in the ALSes which are also available to participate at the meetings in a very valid manner and we therefore support the idea of having appointees at least for the African region to bring about a certain diversity, question of opinions, and the expertise.
Now there was a proposal as to the number which we had to allocate for each region, and we raised the question of what would be the criteria to increase the number in each region. All these questions therefore had been… had received 59.31 to Tricia, to resort to ALSes to have their opinion and to have a decision along these lines. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Fatimata. We need the remote mic for Evan.
Evan?: Sorry.
Cheryl: Oh, sorry. You’ve moved, sorry. Go ahead, Evan.
Evan: Sébastien said I could stay at the table.
Cheryl: Sébastien, you…
Evan: My name’s Evan Leibovitch. I’m chair of the North American region. I’ll keep my comments extremely brief and I think most people at the table will know me as not being easily moved to give platitudes, but I want to thank you extremely. On behalf of everyone I’ve spoken to, you’ve done a fantastic job of reeling in the worst of the Westlake report while maintaining the parts that were good, so I want to thank you for it. I agree with Alan, there might be some fine-tuning on some of the mechanisms, but overall I think you’ve done a fantastic job on this and I really want to thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Evan, and I’m quite sure that’s a reflection of the universal thoughts and wishes about this table and indeed in this room.
I do have a speaking order which is now going Izumi and then Alan again, but because Tricia’s joined us, I would like to go back to the opportunity, which would be for the normal “Hello, here we are” from… we have done our introductions, Tris, but one of the questions raised earlier by Robert was to get a feeling for what the working group may think are the key points for us to discuss.
While I have the microphone, I’d also note that this is scheduled to finish at 10:30. We are at 10:18 and I would like to first of all ask the working group members if they are available for another 10 minutes into the morning tea. If indeed you are available for another 10 minutes into morning tea, I will put that move to extension to the floor. Do I have any objections? So carried for 10 minutes extension.
Go ahead. Thank you, Tricia.
Tricia: Firstly, just… Firstly, just to apologize for being slightly late, 43 one or two days, but also to say the points on the regional aspect I think haven’t been forgotten but will be… there are lots of inputs to balance in. And Evan, I really appreciate because I know that act-… and speaking on behalf of the group because it’s been a fantastic team effort in every single way. We’ve tried really, really hard and this is just really an interim report, but something we wanted to share. But we really appreciate that, all of us.
I think in terms of the key points, and I’ve… you’ve got the one-pager. I quite often like to have one-pagers – because I’ve got a simple mind – that have got the points there. But I think the real thrust is we feel that actually At-Large should be or is and should have the wherewithal…
sound of cell phone interference
Tricia: Sorry. pause I think that’s Vanda’s phone that’s just done that. I don’t think it was sabotage by somebody, I think it was Vanda’s phone 59. laughter
But I think that it was really a balancing thing, that we felt that you needed to have the wherewithal in the organizational structure to do what needs to be done. We also felt, and please take this – perhaps I’m doing an Evan here – please take this the right way, we wanted to actually within that encourage… and mindful of the diversities of the different regions, to find a way to encourage both participation, responsibility… and that’s not to say you’re not responsible now, but responsibility in terms of the participation aspect, compliance aspect, just really the whole aspect within I think that ICANN is trying to achieve. And I think by the suggestion and proposal in principle on Board seats was a part of the way of doing that, because without responsibility and without there being a real voice and a real way of showing this, then that’s a challenge.
So I think the participation, the responsibility, the real contribution, and then picking up on the points, in terms of the physical abilities of the ALSes and RALOs, of trying to find a way of putting the resources out there for you to take the local decisions. But within… Actually, Nick’s just kicked me then. Umm…
laughter
Nick: I have.
Tricia: But it’s within the framework…
Cheryl: We’ll talk later.
Tricia: …yeah, within the framework of the ICANN staff and key responsibility being back at the mother ship. So I think there’s some of the details in the report, but if you wanted the elevator version… And in terms of the voting seats, it is midterm, and you see we’ve put in principle, so it’s not just… But it was actually saying we’re trying to do that and in many ways, and perhaps I should mention it here as well. In the group, we have our light-hearted moments but we actually… 22 looking as one of our tests, is if we’re doing the right thing relates to our workshop later on in the week where we’ve only got an hour and… I don’t know if you mentioned the translations, but tried desperately hard to get you the translations a couple of weeks or a week or so earlier than you did, but at least you got them there. And we really wanted to focus on some of the real meat of responsibility and what needs to be done and to give us some real feedback because this report is really yours – there’s the principles and then the detail comes within there.
So I think that’s it in a nutshell. I don’t know if any of my colleagues might like to add any points, but that’s the 11 bit there. And I also help we can get there for Mexico City because there’s a lot of work going with the other SOs and the advisory committees at the moment, and ALAC is actually given the opportunity to catch up. And I think actually if you are able to hit the deck running this is I think a good way of showing that it can move forward.
So thank you to you, also thank you to my working group colleagues, Patrick and the staff. It has been an amazing team effort, including with Kieran working with Nick in getting the translators stood up to be ready to go when it’s there and lots and lots of the practical details and a real, you know, desire to do that. So I’m hoping with yourselves within ALAC, you’re part of that to enable us to deliver a good report that will work that we can pass to BGC for approval, who can then pass it to the Board when we get to Mexico City. So thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Tricia, and it’s a perfect segue because Harald is the next speaker. And just to let you know, I then have Izumi and Alan.
Go ahead, Harald.
Harald: Thank you. I’m Harald Alvestrand, working group member. Just wanted to remind the people present about two things about the report. One is there are 22 recommendations on which we comment. Any time you spend the Board seats means that we get less feedback on the 21 others. I think there’s stuff in the other recommendations that could theoretically make or break ALAC. So if you don’t comment, not only do you risk that it remains unchanged, you risk that other comments will be taken into account with no opposing voice.
The other thing is this is not the only thing going on. We just had a Board review preliminary report which among other things suggests cutting the number of Board seats in half and floats the idea of abandoning the entire idea of representative Board members and instead having some kind of way to select the Board slate, which would render this entire thing moot.
So please comment on the other stuff too. Don’t use all the time on the Board member stuff.
Cheryl: Thank you. And the cheque is in the mail from the chair of the ALAC on that comment.
If you don’t mind I will shuffle order because it is my privilege to do so and I will go to Jean-Jacques, then Izumi, then Robert. Ah, sorry, Alan, then Robert.
Jean-Jacques: Thank you, Chair. I would like to reinforce what Harald has just said and perhaps take it a couple of steps further. Actually, it is a central element, the voting seats. What we are expecting from you, I think we can say this, is how do you view the mechanism to make it efficient? Whether you think three would be better than two is not the point, or that’s a subsidiary point. What we need is your view on the way to make it efficient, especially in the light of what Harald has just underlined. But there is a general review of the whole system and sooner or later that may have an impact also, but we’re not there. So at this stage of our work, what we need is our input on how it will work.
The second thing, I would like to refer to point 5 on our document, the main points. I read: “ALAC should develop strategic and operational plans…” As far as I’m aware, this morning at our joint meeting, we have not brought that up yet. I think that is very important because it’s… allow me to say o, I think it underlines perhaps one of the points where ALAC in recent years perhaps has given less output to the general system of ICANN. I don’t know, but apparently that was the case. Sorry, I’ve been here only a year.
So there again, I would like to hear from ALAC what is it you view as the systems, the processes by which this could be made more operational.
Then I would like to jump to point 10. I read: “The ALAC is the appropriate organizational channel for the voice and concerns of the individual internet user in ICANN processes.” And 11, which is almost a theological point, and that was brought up very interestingly by Robert, which is… since we have theorem 11, well, the enunciation of theorem 11… sorry, 10. Then 11 means that all the rest is in purgatory or in Hell. So I personally would have an objection to keeping the word “inappropriate.” I would call for another wording, but that’s a minor point. I’d like you to think about the implications of that and whether you think it is a roadblock on our way ahead or whether it conveys the reality.
And finally, point 12, which is “Process for providing advice on policy should be strengthened.” Now that doesn’t mean that you have not been doing that, it simply says that it should be strengthened. So there again I’m waiting… I’d very much be interested in hearing your concrete advice, your specific advice on how you will do that. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Jean-Jacques. And just on one point, because we’re obviously not going to answer each of those in this forum here – believe me, they will all be responded to – the topic for our work after the mid-morning break is titled, “OK, so we’re all a bunch of volunteers. How is this supposed to work?” That pretty much is the strat. planning and accountability framework that we will be discussing in full.
Izumi.
Izumi: Yeah, first I’d like to join what Evan said, that we really thank and appreciate your work much better than we had expected at the point of the Westlake report and discussion. And for that I really thank all the members of the working group, including those who are not here.
And secondly, on what Jean-Jacques said, yes, other than the voting or Board members thing, I really there’s several 14 and acknowledgement of the current ALAC’s functioning as well as to the future direction, and so also the recognition for the need to improve the ALAC mechanism operation to position ALAC as an important part of ICANN asking for the 33 interaction with other parts of ICANN, meaning SOs, advisory committees, and stuff like that.
And to build on, one of the areas where there might be more work, discussion work, consideration should be done by all of us is how to really enforce the 52 and the sustainability of the whole structure, including that of the financial thing. Although your suggestion about cost evaluation should be there, we… you didn’t really explain in details about that. And the fact that RALO came into existence is… with several factors, but including the financial support explicitly made to ICANN. But I understand it raises a concern, is this mechanism, the cost really sustainable for all? If not, how do we really change that?
And also I noticed that your report said that there is some hindering… the three-tier structure, let’s say, is hindering the information flow to and from individual users on some occasions. Overall, yet, you agreed that the current structure is just for one year in place, so better to keep it, and then where necessary improve. But I would like to even among ourselves to start to work to improve that without waiting for another three years, and some of them that might be to take 04 thinking to flatten the layer, that some things could be done globally, not everything should go via the RALO structure, for example, or not everything should go even with ALS for certain individuals. So this experimentation perhaps should be discussed and implemented at the same time without waiting for the next review. It’s very essentially.
Last but perhaps not least about the Board, just briefly, is there’s more functions or work for the Board members than voting, right, or deciding the policies. You work a lot. And by being there, I think there are several different merits of the ALAC to be there that can be addressed. One is of course of the symbolic or representation, that many individual users may feel like “We are represented by, you know, being there” – which may sound too politically symbolic but it’s certainly… in certain cultures it has some effect to raise more attention and participation from the individuals and the ALS and the organizations who may not otherwise have much interest if you’re only liaisoning. But also by being inside the Board other than the liaison, you have to work in the core areas of business of ICANN – be it accountability or budgeting or any other areas – which we have the opportunity and the responsibility by the individuals to be really a part of the organization, not outside. So… And then it will give weight or recognition by other communities of ICANN to make seriously the voices of individual users in the policy matters and operation matters. So as much as I agree that there’s some, you know, wisdom to remain without voting in the Board, there are certain merits that should be really considered hard.
Cheryl: Thank you, Izumi. You wish to make a point of order? Go ahead, Sébastien.
Sébastien: 06
Translator: I shall say it in French, Madame, and this is on purpose. If we have two channels for discussion, political elements 21 in English on what is in this whole, we are then not capable, we whose mother language is not English cannot have a political discussion on the same topic in this very 41. Therefore I request expressly not to use Skype for a political discussion or on a political issue, such as the one we are discussing currently, otherwise you’ll be losing half or three-quarters of the members of this assembly, and that would be a shame. Thank you.
Cheryl: Wendy, do you wish to make a counterpoint or point to that? I have you on the speaking list. pause Okay, thank you.
Alan, go ahead.
Alan: Since we’re going to run out of time, I’m going to take the opportunity to talk about all my points, but very briefly.
laughter
Alan: But very briefly. Regarding what Izumi said on the Board, just to go on record, I would be far less vehemently opposed to just you have a liaison if Board liaisons were eligible to sit as working members of the subcommittees of the Board. I think that’s a major issue and it has less to do with voting than actually participating in what the Board does.
A couple of other issues. I won’t talk much about it, but the whole issue of where do users fit in ICANN, right now we’re essentially on potential collision courses between work going on within the GNSO, work going on within ALAC, within this review, and of course the Board decision which may be somewhere at odds with all of those, and I think we have to do careful… I think we must remember in having the discussion that the ALAC is not just… have within scope GNSO issues. You know, right now I’m working on a request for an issues report. It has some aspects which will go into a PDP, there are other aspects of it which are not policy issues and the ALAC is going to have to take up directly on its path to the Board. So we have to remember that we have different jobs to do and there may well be overlap, and we’re going to have to be careful on definition of “representing users” and “users at the table” and people talking about the “interests of users” – we may end up differentiating people on very unimportant subtleties and I want to avoid that.
In terms of the discussions on planning and strategic plan and operational plan, I strongly support that ALAC must do some planning, must make commitments, must deliver on those. I am pretty well against saying that they must be an integral part of the ICANN planning process because I think that’s a black hole, that if we put that onto our list, we’ll end up doing that and not actually doing any real work. So yes, there has to be some coherence or relation to the two. I’m reluctant to take a group which is just trying to learn how to do real work, real policy work on behalf of ICANN and diverting too much of that into the planning process. So I would approach that with some care.
My last point is I was very… one of the points I was very disappointed in the interim report was on issues of language. Any discussion of At-Large and ALAC, one of the tests I do is I keep on listening to the words “At-Large” and “ALAC,” and they’re not the same.
Cheryl: laughter No, they’re not.
Alan: The document says that language translation capabilities are key to the success of ALAC. They are key to the success of At-Large.
Cheryl: Yes.
Alan: I perhaps stand alone in believing that at the committee level, if people are going to be able to participate in the other working groups within ICANN, in informal discussions, that when I as a currently GNSO rep say, “I need someone to participate in a GNSO working group,” it’s implicitly restricted to people who are very fluent and comfortable in English and people who have an interest and knowledge of GNSO issues, and that becomes a null set at some point. So I strongly feel at the committee level we can’t solve all our problems with translation and we are not going to translate every conversation in the corridor, every mailing list, every working group discussion. And I think it’s politically incorrect – I know – but I think we have to face the fact that at the working level, at the ALAC level, language is… we’re not going to handle multiple languages effectively because the rest… until the rest of ICANN handles multiple languages in every single interaction we do.
Cheryl: Thank you. I’d like to move for a “FURTHER AND FINAL” – notice the capitals – five-minute extension to our conversation so may end our speaking order, which is currently – because again I like to be nice to people who have my future in their hands – Jean-Jacques, Robert, Wendy, and Carlos. That means you have five minutes to share. Do I have any disagreement to the five-minute extension? No? So carried.
Go ahead, Jean-Jacques.
Jean-Jacques: I’ll be saying a few words in French.
Translator: I would like to go back again to the observation made by Alan on the fact that liaisons should be able to participate in the working groups. Independently of the fact that the representatives of the ALAC should… a result of the vote. Anyway, I support this proposal, anyway, for the interim period. When they have the right to vote, that will be settled. So this is my personal opinion, I’m not talking of the Board, but I just wish to inform you. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you. Robert?
Robert: I’ll… Alan talked about the strategic plan issues. I think definitely it’s important and I’ve mentioned that in the past, that we need to look long-term and not meeting-to-meeting and we need kind of more capacity in that regard.
In regards to mechanisms that you mentioned in terms of voting, it’s hard in that would involve a large discussion. What I tried to come up… during the discussions earlier, what are kind of some key things that would be needed in a person that would be on the Board but also important to ALAC and At-Large? I think language skills has come up – language skills not only to participate in the Board but also to engage At-Large and ALAC members as well. I know from a privileged position in speaking various languages, it allows me to interact with everyone without translation. Those skills would be particularly useful in the Board member as well because no doubt individual users from the world might also try to get in touch with that person.
In terms of regional issues, we probably would not want the two Board persons from At-Large or ALAC to be from the same region so that some sort of diversity… The skill set? A lot of Board members come through the NomCom. They go through a very extensive process on what are the skills that are needed. Whether that type of criteria would be needed to At-Large or in the election would be important. And the issue of rotation – whether we want term limits or not.
In regards to 10 and 11 that you were mentioning before, is there a language in terms of how the GAC is structured, in that… that you might want to put it in there so if other constituencies want to represent internet users, then we need to consider… that needs to come to ALAC and our voice may be there. Or you want to use the word “sole, “ so you might want to shrink 10 or 11 so that we are the “sole”…
So I would just leave it at that so my other colleagues can speak.
Cheryl: Wendy.
Wendy: Thanks. I’d like to raise a point of personal opinion and not as Board liaison, specifically raising concern with the provisions 10 and 11. As the report notes elsewhere, the multi-tiered At-Large organizational structure is still under review and reconsideration, still questionable how well that filters the voices and includes the voices of the multitude of individual internet users. And with that uncertainty, I would be personally hesitant to say that individual users should be represented only through ALAC or that even that the ALAC as committee is the only appropriate organizational channel for the voice and concerns of individual internet users. I prefer to see other organizations free to include those voices.
Cheryl: Thank you. Carlos?
Translator: Microphone please? Yes.
I look to the document 04 observations and comments that have been made and on several points. The committee spoke of the need to improve participation, the need to have the users express themselves and that ALAC is the channel for such an expression from users and the need for ALAC to establish a working plan so as to improve the level of participation of the RALOs. And I don’t want to go into another discussion, but I want to say is that from the point of view of the southern parts of Latin American/Caribbean region, the matter of translation is the key to actual participation. Moreover, we have to bear in mind as well that that’s something we have expressed on more occasion at the ALAC, that the participating of the final users has to do with the culture, the knowledge, the living conditions, and in Latin America there are people who do not cover their needs up to the end of the month, so the internet from 00. In Africa, the same applies – sometimes there’s no electricity, no power. So it is very difficult indeed to understand from a good position, from abundance, that only from the point of view of English as a language, we have different… when you have a different culture, it’s very difficult to understand non-participation. So in fact, that’s why I repeat participation, the necessary kind of participation, has to be such as to understand these matters, bearing in mind as well that we are different from one another. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Carlos.
It’s a rare occasion when I relinquish the final word, but with my thanks I’m willing to do so to Tricia, if you would like to summate. And I will take the opportunity… You want one word? You bad man. Just this once. We need to be back here at 11. We have an 11 o’clock briefing, but let’s listen to Tricia and Patrick first.
Patrick S: Just a quick reminder that the document that we’ve been referring today, as many of you would be aware, has been posted, but particularly to draw your attention to the close of the comment period, which is the 12th of December. We’ve tried to make that some days after an ALAC meeting to allow you to get your comments together in that way, and we really would encourage those comments. What… The conversation we’ve started today is a beginning. We really need your comments in that public forum as well.
Cheryl: Tricia?
Tricia: Thank you, Patrick. And that was one of the things I was going to say, to say let this very healthy dialogue continue. Also, yesterday we had a session in the GNSO slot and I think the timing aspect of contributing, there’s a great spirit of cooperation.
I’m not sure, because I hadn’t picked this up in the rush, but there’s a rush for document out for consultation at the moment which is the role of the independent… sorry, the role of the individual internet users in the GNSO, and that picks up on the state of the world we’re in with the many different aspects of Board reviews and NomCom reviews and GNSO reviews and ALAC reviews and all the other ones. And if you haven’t seen that – and I’m not sure if it’s translated or not – I think it’s really worthy of bringing that into the discussions.
Just really also to reinforce the 22 recommendations point of Harald – really, really encourage comments on that.
And finally, everybody’s been very gracious in their comments of the report, and actually I’m not quite sure how to deal with that because it’s probably a first occurrence in ICANN that that’s happened. But I’d also like to as well thank Cheryl and yourselves for really grasping the nettle, because with so much going on in the 27, it’s really now is the time to grasp the nettle, and I think under your leadership that’s really encouraging. So thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you all. There is no need for anyone to leave this floor. Coffee is being served at the end. You can look at it, you can find your way to it. Go left. Be back here at 1100. Thank you all.
47 to 1.51.43
Cheryl: Thank you. I notice we are unfashionably late, being 9 minutes past the hour. I am going to extend for a further 45 seconds for people to join us in the room, and at 10 past we are handing over for a short presentation from Colin Jackson and Andy Linton regarding the Independent Review of the Root Server System Advisory Committee, and I apologize now for missing one of the S’es out in my rather poor attempt at typing that name into the agenda for today. So that’s totally my incompetence – sorry about that. I’ll pop another S in later.
It is important for us to have this introduction because whilst it seems relatively obscure, if this thing doesn’t work, neither does what we want. Therefore some of you, some of your ALSes and some of your regions may wish to participate in this independent review and that is very much what we are going to do today.
It has clicked to 10 minutes past the hour and I’m wondering, do you want to come to sit at the table and present or did wish to…? Who’s going to sit upon my right hand? Okay. Colin, come and sit. Andy… No, no, no.
Colin?: No, Andy…
Cheryl: Come and… Right, okay. Sit. Find a place. That’s good. Okay. Just take over somebody’s space. If they’re not here, I can sell it. Oh, I could perhaps do an auction. I could make some… Yes, we could make some funding money for travel.
laughter
Cheryl: Oh dear.
Colin: Thank you very much, Cheryl. And thank you very much for having me back. I know most of you around the table and most of you will remember of course the ALAC review that…
Cheryl: The what?
laughter
Colin: Some little job that got done earlier this year.
Male: You had something to do with that?
Colin: Apparently yes. I…
Vanda: 47 important job. laughter
Female: inaudible
laughter
Colin: We have been… Amazingly, some might say, we have been asked to do another one. And this one is about the Root Server System Advisory Committee, which as Cheryl points out, the root servers are deeply boring and totally fundamental to the operation of the internet and they’re run by a small cadre of people around the world – and we’re not actually reviewing those because that’s a very technical operation that we’re not even qualified to discuss. Well, I say that. My colleague here, Andy Linton, is in fact somebody who’s of an extremely technical bent and does run the New Zealand root server, but we’ll leave that.
ICANN has the body called the RSSAC that, if most of you are like me, we’ll have been vaguely aware of and perhaps would have known that it meant “Root Server” and that would be beyond… would be the limits of one’s knowledge. What the RSSAC is meant to be there is to provide a channel for advice to ICANN about root server operations. And we are here to review that and to that end, we would very much appreciate any of you have an interest in root server operations and particular how they might affect your ALSes or your constituents, we would like to hear from you.
Now we’ve set up an e-mail address here for anybody to contact us, but also Andy – that’s Andy there – and myself, we are going to be around till Friday morning. We want you to come and stop us and tell us what we should know. So that’s really the end of my message, and thank you for having me again.
Cheryl: Andy, do you wish to say anything?
Andy: Yeah. Just very briefly, I’m Andy Linton. There’s a couple of 42 slides here just really talking about the aims of the review, which would sort of perhaps cement what Colin has been talking about. So there’s two fundamental questions and a bunch of other ones which we’re not going to try and bore you with now. And if we go to the next slide, there’s a picture of us so that if you go back and…
Cheryl: Who’s that man at the bottom? laughter
Colin?: At the bottom, yes.
Female: 03
Andy: I decided that… Colin told me that it was because I was coming here, I had nothing to do with the ALAC thing so I decided on coming disguised so… 12
laughter
Andy: You wouldn’t know who I was, you know, inaudible. So if you go to… And you can stop me and say you think I should cut my hair and shave, it would be better, and so on. I’m happy to have that.
So it would be really useful if you could think about those, or if you’ve got someone back home who would be more qualified or interested to talk to us, then we’re happy to. The review will go on and hopefully be presented in Mexico, so we’ve got a period of time to take comments. So even if you don’t decide to do something about it now, please contact us later.
Colin: Yes. And I can confirm for those who are interested that Andy’s real passion is not in fact running root servers but playing Irish music, and that photograph, he is actually holding a bouzouki although I’ve cut that off in Photoshop.
laughter
Cheryl: Well, it’s just that attention to detail that we believe that you probably need to conduct this review. laughter
Colin: Thank you very much, everybody.
Cheryl: Thank you for your time. Are there any questions or comments before I let these gentlemen escape? Go ahead, Izumi.
Izumi: Thank you. My name is Izumi Aizu, I hope you remember, and I’m an ALAC member from Asia Pacific. I have dealt with the RSSAC many years ago on the Y2K thing, but… and I had an interesting experience. But what exactly are the questions or 37 questions? Or can you show us somehow – later is fine – including does your scope include the operators’ arrangement with ICANN or just solely on the committee?
And all the RSSAC’s meetings are done outside of the ICANN meetings as we know, and it’s very difficult to know exactly what’s happening other than the very brief summary. I’m not too much criticizing that given the nature of their work, but still it is worse to evaluate how much information is available because one of the controversial debates around the internet governance 17 was the misunderstanding, let’s say, about how ICANN is related to the root server and stuff like “Why 13 root servers… the majority are in the US?” and stuff like that. And it was very difficult to get accurate information unless you were familiar with the subject, which is sort of irony or, you know, itself is a dilemma.
So if you can… Are you given that kind of task or are you narrowing the functioning of the committee itself?
Colin: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Izumi, for the question. Our scope does not include root server operations – need to make that abundantly clear. Exactly where the boundary is between and the RSSAC I guess is to some extent up to us in the review working group, but it’s been made clear to us that we’re not here to review root servers, and indeed that would be a very significant and serious task that I don’t think we’re equipped to undertake. However…
Cheryl: 15 just take care of inaudible.
Colin: …the relationship between ICANN and the root server ops is clearly open to a number of different interpretations. I’m not about to, on the hoof as it were, to come up with an exact judgement or view on what it is or what it should be. What we are doing is focussing on the stated aims of the RSSAC and trying to determine the extent to which it meets those and indeed whether those aims are appropriate.
Cheryl: Sorry. I now have a speaking order of… can’t see at all. Here we are: Adam, Vanda, and then Evan.
Adam: Very similar to Izumi’s point, and Andy, you used to string dark fibre along Wellington tramlines, didn’t you? Yeah. Hello, again.
You know, there are general principles of transparency and information provision about all of ICANN’s subsidiary bodies or whatever they are – information-providing bodies – and the RSSAC doesn’t seem to follow any of that. The page is scant of information, there’s not even the report that ICANN produced on the root server problems of February of last year linked from that page, so it’s really an essential part of ICANN’s… you know, we’ve decided it doesn’t work without the root servers. So I would hope that a consideration of the general principles of information provision, transparency, and so on that apply to the rest of ICANN can be considered in the review here. Things like, you know, there’s a liaison on the Board, statements get posted, you know, how does it work would be interesting to know, how does that person receive information and how do they transmit it – all the usual sort of things we’d sort of consider when ICANN is operating.
Colin: All I can say about that Adam is we will find out.
Cheryl: Vanda?
Vanda: Just 17 questions. Your review, will you involve all the mirrors root servers?
Cheryl: The mirror root servers.
Andy?: Oh, the mirrors. You…
Vanda: The mirrors…
Andy?: Yes.
Vanda: …of servers and the relationship with the a.root-servers, with VeriSign, and all those, just to get the framework of this.
Colin: My answer to that is clearly we do have some understanding of how many of the roots are distributed using anycast technologies, however the actual operation of the root servers is outside scope. Processes for determining where those servers might be is at least arguably inside scope or at least something we could comment on.
Vanda: Okay.
Cheryl: Evan?
Evan: Hi there. A question of whether or not the scope of what you’re doing is totally internal or if there’s any external factors to be considered. And by that I mean every now and then I see articles in the mainstream press, IT press about various countries that say that they want to invent their own root servers outside of the existing system, and so every now and then there are threats like this and say, “Well, the existing system isn’t relevant, so our country’s considering doing out own root server system.” I’m wondering if your review is taking any of this into account or is it only an internal review without any consideration of these external pressures, shall we say?
Colin: Yeah, that’s an interesting perspective, Evan. I suspect most of that gets to philosophical for what our scope is. Certainly, as many of you know, I have been hanging around the internet in one frame… one way or another.
laughter
Colin: That sounds very sordid, doesn’t it?
Cheryl?: It does rather, yes.
Colin: For many years, and I’m familiar with a lot of the debates about splitting the root and running different forms of roots within certain countries. I don’t think that that is going to sit within the scope that we have been given which is more focussed on… if I can put it this way, it’s focussed on the relationship between ICANN and the root servers as they stand rather than on sort of broader philosophical issues about how the roots should operate or whether there should be more than one or so forth.
Cheryl: Nick?
Andy: Can I just 47 just on the tail end of that as well? I think one thing that probably is relevant in there is that if the Root Server Advisory Committee is providing advice to ICANN about what should happen and so, on that, clearly we’ll talk about that sort of stuff. And one of the things we’re keen to find out is are people aware of 07 on topics like this or any other sort of things that relate to the root servers being given and being disseminated, which is sort of what Adam’s talking about – you know, that transparency thing. So we certainly in our background reading and so on have looked at the documentation that’s available on the net. Some of it’s on the ICANN site, some of it’s available if you search around and you sort of… related areas, but it’s not clearly linked directly to ICANN, some of that information. And maybe it should be and maybe it shouldn’t. And these are the views we’re trying to elicit from people – either “What does this committee do” and “What perhaps should it do.” You know, if you think the things it’s doing aren’t correct or aren’t sufficient or irrelevant anymore or whatever, it’s those views we’re after.
Cheryl: Thank you. I now have Nick, Sébastien, Izumi, and we will close off.
Nick: I just wanted to note that the three slides are linked to the Cairo Documents page and there will shortly be a link to the URL which is the microsite for the RSSAC review for those who wish to know more. Thank you.
Cheryl: Sébastien?
Sébastien: Yeah. I understand what it’s… maybe the border of your work, but as an end-user perspective, what really we need is that the root server is working and useful, and how it could work if any trouble happens in one part of the world. And I am not… I don’t want to 51 which type of trouble, but there are many reasons why it could have some trouble in one part of the world unfortunately.
And therefore I think that we as users will be very interested to understand really how it’s working, because for example I have two ways to explain what is the geographic of root server. I can say, “There are 13 root servers, 11 of them are in the US – bullshit!”
Cheryl: laughter 32 …translate.
Sébastien: And I can say, I don’t know today what is the figure, but “100-200 around the world and some dozen in US – superb!” Then on the same thing, I can show you two really very different images, and I don’t know which one is a good one. If I am anti-American, as I am surely a little bit…
laughter
Sébastien: …I will stick to the first one, saying that it’s “We don’t need the 11 and we need to have more root servers outside of the Washington area.” But if I am not so much, I say that “An anycast solution, I’m open door.” But I am right? Wrong? I am not sure. And I will be very happy to know what those technologies, especially anycast, brings to the security and the stability of the ICANN in general.
And my last point, to be short, it’s that we are an AC, we are not dealing with one or the other techniques, technical or policy bodies. We need to know and we need to interact with each and every topics and bodies. It’s why I would like to suggest that as the discussion is going on with the review of the RSSAC and with the review of ALAC, here too to have a liaison with these two organizations.
Thank you very much. And just one point: Are you sure that you type well?
Cheryl: No.
Sébastien: Because “A” seems to be missing.
Cheryl: Ah, there you go. laughter
Sébastien: Thank you.
Colin: Ah, yes, that is true.
Cheryl: I will now fix that. Izumi?
Izumi: Just for 44 because this committee’s mandate or objective is to advise ICANN on the matters of the operation of the root servers, right? But the review is not reviewing the operation itself nor the relationship between operators and the committee and the ICANN. Am I correct?
Colin: The review is reviewing the advisory committee, it is not reviewing the RS ops. An analogous situation for ALAC might be that the ALAC review did not look at the… did not review ALSes.
Izumi: But ALAC which is composed of ALSes. Well, the difference is the root server… First of all, it’s very unclear who is actually on the committee. It’s almost impossible to find out from 10 minutes’ web browsing, right?
Colin: We’ll take that comment onboard, Izumi.
Izumi: Okay.
Colin: We…
Male: 48
Colin: To some extent we share you frustrations as well.
laughter
Izumi: I’m very unclear about what exactly you are going to study still. What exactly are you going to…?
Colin: What exactly are we going to study? We’re going to form a view based on everything we can find out on whether or not the advisory committee is meeting its terms of reference.
Izumi: Right. But the terms of reference, well it’s sort of…
Cheryl: Umm-hmm, circular argument.
Izumi: I have to give up, but it’s sort of, you know, going around about operation or not. But this committee’s solely advising about the operational matters, technical operational matters, and then you’re saying that you’re not reviewing the operation per se. So meaning “So what?” is my question.
Andy: Just… We do share your frustrations, Izumi, in trying to find out exactly what the committee is and so on. As part of this review, as well coming to this session and other sessions at the ICANN meeting, we’ll also be going to Minneapolis in two weeks to the IETF meeting where RSSAC will actually meet and, you know, we’re going to try to get the perspective of what’s going on from that side of things. But just to make it really clear, we won’t be coming up with recommendations that say there aren’t enough name servers in Africa or Asia Pacific or South America and that the root server operators are doing a really bad job. We will not be in that space at all but we will be looking at the nature of the advice that is being given to ICANN.
Cheryl: Thank you. I have Nick and then Patrick and then it is finished. Go ahead.
Nick: I just wanted to note very quickly that the terms of reference for the review were themselves the subject of a public consultation before the Board approved them. And the terms of reference as approved are available on icann.org and I will shortly have a URL available where you can go and review those. And so all the infor-… I think that what you’re looking for is available. I’ll just provide you with a… Whether or not you agree that it’s sufficient terms of reference…
Male: 06
Cheryl: Ah, ah, ah… Go ahead, Patrick.
Patrick VW: Well, I think it’s already symptomatic. Many people here in the room share this same experience that it’s very difficult to get information about the RSSAC. And what I see, I have their list of meetings and they all match ITF meetings and not ICANN meetings. So typically RSSAC is quite disconnected physically from the rest of the ICANN community, so they work a bit between themselves and it’s quite difficult to understand what these people actually do or what their processes are and so on. And I think that there’s a great need for more transparency and it would be nice to see these people in ICANN meetings so that we can actually talk to them and discuss with them because that’s the whole idea of having these large face-to-face meetings, is that people can build networks and talk to each other between different ACs and constituencies.
Cheryl: Excellent points. It sounds to me, gentlemen, that you have several hot bodies that should be found in the corridors and grilled as you did me. I might just share with you that I’ve done my interview. It only took me 15 minutes. Now considering I cannot give my name and address in under 5 minutes, it shows you how much commitment of time you’re being asked to make here. I would strongly encourage any of you, preferably half of you, and I’d love to think all of you – at least those of you with an interest in this matter to catch up with Colin and Andy and to take very little time to make some very important comments.
Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for joining us and you’ve got our faces. Track us down. pause
Okay. Looking back at our agenda, we now have some 30 minutes available… actually some 29 minutes available for what was going to be a 1-hour exercise. So we’re going to modify that.
The whole concept of what we’re going to be looking at this afternoon when we do an analysis and try and look at the key recommendations of the ALAC review mid-point paper, discussion paper is going to in my absolutely biased opinion come back again and again to “We are still volunteers. How on earth is this supposed to work?” So what I’d like to take the time in this next 30 minutes, looking around the room and doing a quick calculation, I’d like to do a little icebreaking exercise and find out what on earth we’re all doing here as volunteers. So in 60 seconds, which will take up our half hour, but give us a feel for what is driving us to be here spending our valuable time and energy in this activity. It might be a good grounding then to look at later how we are then going to encourage, grow, and indeed reward appropriately the ALS volunteers as we bring them onboard and make them a firmer part of the process. The RALO teams. All of this requires volunteer input, and might I say, as someone who has managed volunteers in one of the most restful fields – the emergency services – this organization does an appalling job. I have no idea other than some sense of greater good why many of us are here, and I would like to know from each and every one of you in 60 seconds, why are you at this table? If it’s to see the Sphinx, let me know. Be honest, be open. Why are you here?
Beau, go.
Beau: Because I was inspired by the opportunity to participate in the ALAC during a controversial time when a lot of people in the consumer community were dismayed at what had happened in prior history, and this presented an opportunity maybe to make some changes and see some changes and represent users better in internet policy.
Cheryl: Fatimata.
Fatimata: Oui…
Translator: Yes. I wanted to participate in ALAC because I have a mission to carry out regarding Africa, regarding the African reality, and above all to enhance and show our needs and our preoccupations vis-à-vis the internet.
Cheryl: You’re way too fast. Wendy. laughter
Wendy: Wendy Seltzer, and I’ve been an ICANN participant for a long time because I care about free expression and think the internet is a wonderful tool for that innovation and that ICANN could do a lot to make that worse.
laughter
Cheryl: Hopefully not. Evan.
Evan: I wonder about the choice of the word “could.”
laughter
Evan: Sorry. I’ve been around essentially to try and poke a little tiny viewing hole into what I think is general perceived at least within the community I’ve historically been a part of as something very opaque, something very untransparent, and something that appears to have acted in a number of ways that could be perceived to be hostile to the global user community, and I’m here to try and do my little bit of a part to try and help balance that.
Cheryl: Hawa.
Hawa: Hawa…
Translator: I am here for the very same ideas as the others – to be able to make a contribution as much as possible to my community and vice versa, to truly be able to communicate with the new users, the new African users, and unfortunately is rather limited in Africa and we hope to do the maximum to serve 57.
Cheryl: Hong.
Hong: Okay. I’m from the world’s largest country-based internet community, and there are some critical policy issues from ICANN that is acutely affecting the interest in that community such as on the internationalized domain names. So I believe it is important for me to bring the voices of these very 22 people to the ICANN forum.
Cheryl: Patrick.
Patrick VW: Well, I think we, the internet users, are the ones who are actually paying the bill in the end. It’s not the registries, it’s not the registrars, it’s not the ISPs, because all these people work with our money, so in the end I think because we are the ones paying in the end, we should be the ones that have the voice.
Cheryl: Robert.
Robert: 58
Translator: I’m here because for many years I took part in the discussions concerning information and themes of the governance of internet. ICANN is a key organizations as a regulator of much that is taking place and what I’ve been trying to do is to bring about a better participation in my country and the region and the necessary steps to be taken in order to help the new users of internet, the young people whose voices are really still absent and who are using the internet in many creative manners. I believe that their voices should be present, so that’s how we should organize matters. And there are several languages and I try to be a bridge participating with all the knowledge I might have. Thank you.
Cheryl: Darlene.
Darlene: I have no idea.
laughter
Cheryl: That’s a very valid point, Darlene, and one we’ll need to address later. Sébastien.
Sébastien: Maybe just because it’s warmer here than in your country. So that could be one reason.
laughter
Darlene: It’s not worth the time.
Sébastien: It’s an interesting and tricky question. I’m participating through the ICANN meeting since the Melbourne meeting in 2001, in different capacities, different places, for different reasons. When I joined the At-Large world, it was because no French organizations were members at that time and I thought it was a good announcement to the overall organization to have a stable organization and participation of the end users – and on a really different way on what’s… how it’s organized in other fora, because we are intended not to be the civil society but the end-user representative, and for me it’s a big difference and 42 it’s important.
And I think I have some dreams, I am not sure that I will never see it – for example, that the DoC leave ICANN and internet to live its own life, that we have a real international organization. I know that I am a little bit guilty because I was also one who pushed… 13 and then the Aussie, New Zealand, and… are now the leaders of the internet in the world…
laughter
Sébastien: And then we have to struggle that also. But I think even though Cheryl was the right one to be chair of our group, then sometime even if I think it’s difficult, I prefer to have a good person…
Cheryl: 45 Australian.
Sébastien: …even if she’s from Australia.
Female: That’s all you can get! laughter
Sébastien: Because if you… It’s not just a joke, because if you look – sorry to say that – you have a lot of – and so on – Australians in the staff, Australians in the different AC, SOs, and that’s a fact. But…
Cheryl: Time. Winding up, Sébastien. laughter
Sébastien: Okay. I am… 18
Translator: I’ll stop at that.
Cheryl: Thank you. Rudi.
Rudi: Well, first of all, I’m here because I want to be the listening ears for the Belgian internet users. And secondly, as probably most of you know, Belgium is a country where we have a very complex government and I’m trying to understand how I could make it better by listening to how ICANN functions. Maybe the Belgian governments – we have four of them in so small a country – perhaps I can learn our Belgian government how better organized they could be once they listen to ICANN and ALAC.
laughter
Cheryl: I’m not sure you need to listen to 03 to get those answers. Okay.
Forty years ago I became a volunteer in a very demanding organization and I was appalled at how the volunteers were treated there and then. Many, many moments later, having made great changes in that organization and in fact getting the accountability framework organized, I wrote myself out because I was no longer meeting the core criteria for fitness to serve in the organization. Therefore I needed to look at what else could take all this spare time I suddenly had. I run independent family-owned internet-dependent businesses. Therefore the internet, naming and nomenclature on the internet, and my voice as a consumer, be it as an individual, be it as a business, or be it as – because I’m also on not-for-profit boards and on government-sanctioned organizations involved in communications in my country – those voices have to be heard, have to be respected, and have to be more than lip service.
Therefore my time, for the short time that I will be with you – because I don’t do anything for more than six years on a voluntary role – I need to change the directions. You become mouldy and set in your ways too fast. You make you changes, you make your help, you move on. And I’m hoping that my volunteer experience here might just help us improve how we are treating the real players here – the internet-using voices and the registrants. And yes, Patrick, we’re all going to start wearing t-shirts if necessary, saying, “Source of registrant-derived funds.”
Vanda.
Vanda: Very good, Cheryl. I can suggest a strike. laughter
applause
Vanda: That’s a good idea, no? You stop paying, you know? Let’s discuss who is the sponsor here. laughter That’s one way.
Cheryl: 15
Vanda: Yeah. Well, I’ve been in ICANN issues since ’99, beginning of 2000, and been representing my country during many years, and then joined the Board. And so I’ve realized that I could really make some difference for my country to work in the other side of the Board – that is the users. And it’s really a reality that in developing countries, if you have a voice that is not normally heard in many occasions and is defending the users, someone is starting to pay attention on that.
The other reason is that I do believe a multistakeholder model, and I would like to believe that this model could work. It’s not working in my opinion, but the idea is too good to waste. And I’d like to help this. In many occasions, I have discussed it with the people in the 52, that I do believe that United Nations in the future will need to go to the multistakeholder model. And this is the opportunity we have to show to the world that the model could really work and I believe this will make a lot of difference in the history. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Vanda. Now the staff aren’t actually volunteers so I’m going to skip them now, but they… I will come back if we have time at the end because having worked closely with them and being pleasantly surprised by what I found when I got close enough to work with them, they actually do volunteer a great deal of their time. So time permitting, we will come back to you gentlemen – and our new lady, it might be an opportunity to introduce you at that point.
Please go ahead, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline: Hi, it’s Jacqueline. The reason I started with this because initially there was very little participation from the Caribbean in ICANN and I was making a lot of noise to a lot of people about “Why don’t you get more people involved?” and so on. And then Adam Peake said, “Well, if you’re making so much noise, why don’t you sign up for the NomCom?” And a lot of the other people in WSIS, the ICANN people in WSIS said, “Yeah. You know, stop making noise and come up and do something.” So I did.
And four years later, nearly, there’s a lot more participating, the RALOs are formed, etc. And I am tired and I have other things to do. So I might as well, I’m out of here after this meeting, minimum participation on the list and so on. ALAC has been a second full-time job in terms of time I’ve spending – for three and a half years I’ve been spending 40 to 60 hours a week on it – and I did it though because I was wanting to make the sacrifice in order to help make a space here for Caribbean people. And it was worth it. Otherwise… I mean, the issues are important, I am interested in them, but the amount of time that it takes and the amount of energy that it take, it’s just too much for too long.
But Carlton’s here…
laughter
Jacqueline: …and there’s a lot of… laughter No, no, no. There’s a lot of Caribbean people waiting in the wings to participate and I will participate and try and keep poking them to get in and share their views because there is an issue where they’re not willing to ask questions on the list because they say, “Well, I don’t know anything about the topic so I’m not going to ask any questions about the topic,” and we have to get over that somehow.
And that’s it for me.
Cheryl: Thank you. Carlos.
Translator: Very well. It’s very simple I think. A few years ago for a question having to do with life itself, I decided to select a theme for my thesis and in the final analysis it was “in defence of the consumer.” As of that moment, I required information, I sought that information, and I realized that the users of my region did not have that information and I thought that internet has to be learned, understood, well known in order to be used in an efficient and effective manner. If it is efficient, it’s useful. It’s not only for chatting, for sending e-mails, or whatever. Yes.
Internet is a very useful tool for the development emerging economies. I live in a country of emerging economy and I’m a professor, a teacher of economics. So all these things make me feel that I need to know, now that I know that I am begging to learn with the organization to which I belong, we are giving or imparting to our users all the information and knowledge we have through chats, seminars, courses, classes. In other words, we are building the capacity. We are capacity-building of the users within the limits of my knowledge. I’m a legal person so there are technical matters that I don’t sufficiently know but I think I can complete some other technical knowledge and 42 situation from the legal point of view. That’s why I’m here. What I’m trying to do is to give my community what I have learned and what I have. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you. José?
José: 54
Translator: I’m here because some lessers of my region elected me to represent them and defend their rights. I was elected for that since I’ve been working for a few years and I’m a bit of a pioneer in Venezuela, my country, concerning laws applied to informatics, in this particular field. And this work I’ve also done in Latin America 36 I became known for that reason for which I was elected. Moreover, if I’m here in Egypt and if I’ve travelled across the world to be here, it’s my only chance to see the Pyramids. Thank you.
Cheryl: I’m glad someone was brutally honest. Mohamed.
Mohamed: I guess the reason I’m here, because seven years ago myself and a group of internet engineers in my country, which is a developing country, formed an NGO volunteer organization which basically focussed on internet awareness and we ended up managing our country’s ccTLD and involved in different aspects of internet development within our country. And I’m active, so I moved to the next level where there was a vacant in our region in participant, so I tried that vacant. And part of… one of the reasons of joining ALAC was my frustration of the participating at the first ALAC. So I was watching how ALAC was evolving and my region elected me to jump on this seat, and recently I feel the challenge and it’s huge, the transformation of ALAC. It’s incredible how things are changing now. But we still have challenges in terms of diversity and bearing in mind that, we represent different backgrounds, internet users with different interests, and how we participate and the level of participation, which differs. But it’s really interesting for me, and it becomes time-consuming, but I’ll try to do my best and I’m enjoying it.
Cheryl: Well, if you’re enjoying it, that’s a very good thing. We just would like to make sure everyone is enjoying it more. Carlton.
Carlton: I guess my involvement is quite accidental on several levels. I returned to the region – I’m Jamaican – in 2002, and prior to that we were involved in agitating for a change in the telecommunications regime in my country. And the government bureaucrat for telecommunications policy at the time, a lady named Camilla Rhone, is a friend of mine. And Dr. Rhone invited me to be the senior advisory to the GAC for the Government of Jamaica. About the same time, I took a job with the University of the West Indies as a teacher and as a senior university administrator, and the issues for the university, a regional institution covering 15 islands across the Caribbean, was access and how we would engender access, and telecommunications and the internet became very important in all of that. And after working as a senior advisor to the GAC, essentially I wrote position papers for the Government of Jamaica with regard to internet issues through the GAC.
And end of 2006, I got an invitation from… I think Jacqueline was involved in it, to become more involved in internet governance from the user perspective. And because of my work with the university and struggling with the issues of access and how the internet would have improved access and the real development imperative that the University of the West Indies has for the region I thought was a good idea. And we became engaged in the At-Large organization.
Cheryl: Tick, tick, tick, tick…
Carlton: It really is about helping the region to use the internet for development, and that is why I’m engaged.
Cheryl: Thank you. Sorry to cut you off. Wolfgang.
Wolfgang: Okay. I feel meanwhile like a veteran in this movement. I 36 was involved in the debates since the late 1990s. I still remember a very cold day in January 1999 at Harvard when Wendy was still a credit or PhD student at the Harvard Law School, and the basic discussion at this time was “Okay, if there is a new innovative governance model for the internet, then the governments should be in an advisory capacity and the decision-making should be in the hands of the people who are really affected and concerned” – that means the users and the providers of services. This was a really revolutionary, innovative idea in the beginning. And the whole system works only if you have a strong voice of the users. And the original idea was to have a balanced, 9 to 9, composition of the Board, and we all know, you know, why this didn’t work and so we have now the structure we have which is probably not the end of history, and we have to move forward and to develop it further.
So I would fully support what Vanda has said, that the principle of multistakeholderism, which is the innovation of the politics of the 21st century needs… works only if we have a strong civil society and strong user community. And this is our responsibility, to organize ourselves in a ways that we can contribute to the general process, but it means we have to do our homework first and then to have the input. But, you know, if the homework is done, then we have to consider all the, you know, how we move from a voice to a vote back in the process. And I think this is one reason why I’m still engaged in the At-Large movement and I think this has to be done in the years ahead, in the post-35 phase, that we have to reconsider how an ICANN 3.0 should be organized and which role, more enhanced user representation should be there. Thank you.
Cheryl: Izumi.
Izumi: Yes. Why? Because I always like to do things or explore the things new or unknown. I want to be a pioneer and I’m usually quite good at it. When we started to use PCs, that’s in the early ’80s, or the internet in the ’90s, I was trying to evangelise that. For ICANN, I try to bring voices of the minorities – Asia Pacific was very underrepresented in the formation process, or the developing countries folks, or the non-English native speakers still. And all these missions for me is not yet complete almost at all. I wanted to have an exit strategy because I came to the 35 before ICANN. This is my 31st ICANN meeting. I missed 2.
laughter
Izumi: This is perhaps my last ALAC meeting of sorts. I’m not too sure whether I should step down or go away or still be here. So what’s my exit strategy? And I can’t find one, so I’ll stay for a while perhaps.
But more positively, I find many likeminded people, new and exploring pioneers from all corners of the world. If you try to do an interview, why do you study this, you will be amazed to hear the case from Siavash from Iran or Norbert from Cambodia even outside ALAC. So this is a wonderful place and we can make some difference if we work effectively.
Finally, I’m helping now the satellite broadband in Japan to the remote corners of these, you know, and hopefully to bring that to Asia, so ICANN is not the only game I play. Thank you.
Cheryl: Thu Hue, please.
Thu Hue: Hello, and thank you, the chair. 47 first time I speak since I arrived in Cairo to you. I feel very guilty because I have a feeling that most of the criticism to the participation of the ALACs may be to me. So now is the chance for me to speak a little bit.
Why I come to 07, as sometime I ask myself, “Maybe I’m in the wrong place.” What the hell am I doing with this group of people? Where at home inaudible that my house have to move to elsewhere. So actually a few years ago I was an activist in my country, Vietnam. I’m talking about 30… 85 million people. And I’m very active in my country. Almost every month I appear in national media, on national television or radio, so 36 inaudible a busy person, but I see I’m still very busy in this kind of forum. So I have a responsibility to try to overcome my shy. If I am not… be able to participate in this, how can other 85 people, the internet users can participate? And I’m not talking about Lao, Cambodia, and other Indochina. So I have to try myself, and there is something driving me, because you’re talking about internet users and until today I understand that I lack 06 for the normal, ordinary internet users. So that if we want to over… to do the digital divide and we can do something for the rural development. So I still find myself that I have to overcome something so that I can learn something and overcome the shy and so that then other internet users can be benefit from ICANN process.
Cheryl: We’re here to help and we look forward to the excellent outcomes. Karaitiana.
Karaitiana: I’m here… So I initially joined APRALO to be a voice for my people, my country, and now I see myself being here as one voice of… perhaps of indigenous peoples around the world and also because I’m passionate about the internet. And I believe the more diverse the opinions are at this table and throughout ICANN, the much better the internet will be. Thanks.
Cheryl: Pavan?
Pavan: Pavan Budhrani, APRALO Secretariat. I do believe I’m the youngest one here.
laughter
Pavan: I’ve been working only for a year, so give me a break or something, yeah? So I represent Asia Pacific where we have the highest number of internet users, so as Cheryl might as well tell you, from the summit questionnaire, that our ALSes are not well connected. So basically I’m trying to find ways to connect them better – language barriers, other ways as well. Working with Nick on other stuff as well. So, you know, trying to make the less active ALSes wake up from their hibernation and actually be more active in the Asia Pacific region. Thank you.
Cheryl: Adam.
Adam: Yeah, Nick, could you bring up the agenda screen? Because it says why I’m here. pause Alright. Well, what it basically says… it describes the practice model of – well, I changed it – ALS, RALO, ALAC, and ICANN, this communication that we have. It should be behind there, isn’t it? The agenda we have. Or perhaps you have it on your screens. I edited it actually and it now says “Users” – arrow, arrow – “ALS, RALO, ALAC, ICANN,” and the reason I went to the Nominating Committee process is because I want to see if this ridiculous and convoluted system of trying to bring… It’s there. I added “user” and I’ll delete it because it has no place on an agreed agenda. But I think it has a place, but it’s an agreed agenda so it should be deleted. But the model at the top is something that I want to see if it works, and I think I’m going to try and spend the next two years seeing if it works. I don’t think it will, and that’s an unusual way to begin participating in an organization, but I think it’s convoluted and I think it’s silly, but I think we have to try and make it work otherwise having two Board members will be meaningless, having all representation into other GNSOs, into things that are affecting people’s business, that’s are affecting registrants and how they get their domain names… Well, I think we have to try and make that work, so that’s why I’m here.
Cheryl: Annette.
Annette: Well, I have been working as a volunteer all my life I can say. So this is just one stage of volunteer work and I think the setting up global communication infrastructure, the internet, and make sure that everyone, the users have a fair share. And actually it’s set up for the users, that is the important part. And now we are… what Izumi said, it is pioneer work in the sense that things are going to… that we have to try to make things not only transparent but also get users and their opinions involved, those who don’t know yet what is going to happen, and they should be part in shaping, they should get the chance in shaping.
I put a lot of work as a chair of the At-Large Advisory Committee in setting up these RALOs. And Adam, I think yes, this structure is extremely complicated and we really should focus in the future, or I should rather say I can help in supporting this because it is also my last ALAC meeting here. So I think the focus of the ALAC and the individual users involved here should rather focus on how we could really set up a structure that works in the sense of getting connected to institutions who do have facilities – like universities, like others. And there are more volunteers out there, and I think we can get them. Thanks.
Cheryl: I hope we can keep them when we do. Wolf. pause
Wolf: Thanks, Sébastien. Well, I’m here because I’m kind of a product Annette’s endeavours some years ago when she started to build up the regional At-Large Structures. And when Annette tried to create EURALO, I was one of the guys who was invited to the initial meeting. And so I got stuck in this process, and that’s one of the reasons why I started my first ICANN meeting in February this year in New Delhi.
And I can perfectly understand what our colleague and friend from Vietnam was saying. It’s 36… sometimes like a wall to me. So many names, new names, acronyms, technical terms, this variety of high skilled people, of cracks. People like Wolfgang Kleinwächter working in this field since decades and having a level of expertise I will never have. Or people like Wendy Seltzer or like Cheryl Orr, many others in the room.
And I especially was attracted by the idea having and organizing an internet user summit, because since I’m involved in EURALO, I’m almost asking myself daily or at least weekly, “What is an internet user? Who is this guy? Who is this? What are his/her characteristics?” So I have a rather vague idea about this new specimen. I think the typical internet user is probably like a personal computer user as long as it works.
laughter
Wolf: He doesn’t care so much about how it’s working or why it’s working, it’s the same phenomenon with car users. So I’m using cars for decades already. I don’t… On a technical level, I do not understand too much about how it works but I’m satisfied as long as it works. And I can imagine for the majority of internet users issues like privacy are not so much of interest or relevance to them as long as they do not have a very concrete disadvantage in their career or in their daily life. And I think the challenge to me or the challenge for my ALS or the challenge for RALOs is to sensible-ize people, especially on the level of the civil society and organizations, to get involved more in basic issues of internet governance. And “internet governance,” which sounds as a very abstract issue, can have very concrete consequences in the life of people in their everyday life.
Cheryl: Thank you. I’m planning to cut this at around 12:15, perhaps 12:17 at the latest. We will be returning here at 1 o’clock when we have a similar presentation to the RSSAC review this morning with the SSAC reviewers.
It doesn’t give us enough time for lunch? Okay. Let’s look at that then. What sort of timing for lunch is going to be appropriate then? Because we’ve got a… Sorry?
Wendy: 13 minutes.
Male: 32
Wendy: Oh, okay. Well, then give us an hour, because that’s… overtalking
Cheryl: Say again? Use the mic.
Wendy: If you’re going to go to a restaurant and eat, you need an hour.
Cheryl: Okay. So you’re saying returning at 20 past? Half past? That’s what I’m asking. Okay. In which case, we need to let the SSAC reviewers team know that we’re having them at half past. Not a problem, but each time we come back from a break late, it eats into our agenda. I’m not saying that, I’m saying that what happens is the five minute gets added all through the day. Something has to give, and I agree, it shouldn’t be the energy-reviving of lunch.
So we now return at 1:30 when the SSAC reviewers will be here.
The next few minutes needs three things to happen. I do want to ask why both the staff we have here that we know so well are here, because yes, they’re paid, but what on earth attracted them to work with us and why are they still here I’d like to hear in 60 seconds. And most importantly, we need to be introduced to Marie-Helénè, and perhaps I might ask Nick to introduce her now so we know what on earth this strange woman at the back of the room is and what she can do for us. And then perhaps both of you for 60 seconds and we will be out of here for lunch and back at 1:30. Thank you all.
Nick: Yes, you will notice off to my left, waving…
Cheryl: Stand up, dear.
Nick: …is behind her Dell computer, now standing, is Marie-Helénè Bouchoms of Belgium, who speaks very fluent Spanish, French, and English – to cover the gamut – is helping us out especially due to us being shorthanded because Frederic’s position is still open. So if you see her name popping up from time to time, she’ll be helping in particular with a lot of the administrative tasks, minuting, posting of minutes, and all that sort of thing. Because there are now three of us, it’s even more important that if you have any request that you want to be absolutely sure one of us deals with, just send it to the staff@atlarge account, because that way all three of us will get it and we’ll just sort it out between ourselves who actually does it. So there you have it. We’re glad t have here.
Cheryl: And why are you here, Nick, other than the paycheque?
Nick: I’m here because I got approached actually to work in a consulting capacity when Denise was promoted from the Director of At-Large to her current position. I got approached to deal with three of the regions in At-Large on an interim basis while a new director was sought. And I agreed to help out not because the internet or internet policy is in any way an area of interest for me – I can quite candidly tell you that it is not. I do know how to program routers, I have been an IT director, I quite deliberately left my career in IT behind because I’d gone as far as I wanted to in that career. But I did see that the model of international governance which ICANN could represent was an important evolution in international governance of a shared resource and I thought there was a lot of merit in helping that model be effective, and in particular in helping a model in which the average person was an important stakeholder. That’s why I agreed to get involved and that’s why in the end I did agree to put my name forward for the permanent posting.
Cheryl: Thank you, Nick.
Nick: I’m really glad you all care about the internet and how it works.
Cheryl: Matthias.
Nick: Don’t get me wrong.
Cheryl: Stop, Nick. Matthias.
Matthias: Well, I do care about the internet. laughter And…
Cheryl: laughter Phew! I had 45.
Matthias: …I do like the internet, and I’m not so much interested in the technical aspects just as Nick is not so much interested in the technical aspects of it, but I am very interested in the multistakeholder model. And as some of you know, I worked at… or interned at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum before I came here and they have a similar although somewhat different multistakeholder model, and I was attracted to that, basically, and wanted to pursue my career in a multistakeholder model. And part of it also because I think to work with volunteers is perhaps more demanding than working with business clients, because, well, you need to chase them more and understandably they have other things to do so they won’t always reply to whatever you ask them. But there are a lot of very interested and passionate people that you deal with and it makes it very rewarding to work with them.
Cheryl: Thank you. And thank you all. I actually think this little exercise, which under normal circumstances would have been done at the beginning of a OneDay workshop, but we had active business requirements, is an important thing. We’ve built over the last four meetings these OneDay workshops to be as much a networking and learning about each other, our needs and our desires, and indeed now we are about to move into a new version of the ALAC, why we’re here and how we’re going to keep ourselves here and encourage others is very important.
1:30 is the return time. Sébastien will be chairing the first 15 minutes. My 12 o’clock meeting, which means I am not having lunch, is certainly going to be running over time now. I apologize. Do not wait for me. Sébastien will be at the chair. Thank you all. pause
Adam?: And can we leave equipment in the room? pause Excuse me. Can we leave laptops and things in the room?
Cheryl: We had said that this will be locked or someone will be…
Male: 04
Cheryl: Good. Someone is here.
Adam?: Don’t like that answer.
Cheryl: inaudible
Adam?: Alright.
17 to end
End of Audio
ALAC/At-Large Policy and Planning OneDay #4 – Cairo ICANN Meeting – Part 2
(Held November 02, 2008)
Legend
Name: First name of member of group
Name L: First name plus first initial of last name if there's more than one person with the same first name.
Name?: If we think we might know who's speaking but aren't 100% sure.
Male: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a male.
Female: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a female.
Translator: If translator actually translates French or German for a participant we will note it as “Translator”. It will normally be evident from the dialogue who the translator is translating for. If not, we will include a note in square brackets with respect to who they are translating for.
********************************************************************************************************
List of Participants
Important Note: Please note that this should not be considered to be an "official" list of the attendees. This is just a list of the participants that we were able to identify during the transcription. There may have been others present that didn't speak and some people may have participated that were not on the official list of attendees published on the internet.
Aizu, Izumi
Ashton-Hart, Nick (ICANN Staff)
Bachollet, Sébastien
Greenberg, Alan
Guerra, Robert
Langdon-Orr, Cheryl (ALAC Chair)
Peake, Adam
Samuels, Carlton
Scartezini, Vanda
Schmidt, Jeff (SSAC Review)
Schombe, Baudouin 
Seye Sylla, Fatimata
Vande Walle, Patrick
********************************************************************************************************
Sébastien: I reconvene the meeting, and as Cheryl told you at the beginning of the… end of the last spot of the meeting that she will be late and she asked me to chair this part of the meeting. The topic for the sessions, it’s about the… pause SSAC review. And we have the chance to have the two gentlemen who will handle this review, once again with the help of Patrick, and I will ask as soon as they are able to sit down and they get their tools for the translation to follow if something is said in another language.
I see you don’t need to do too much because for the moment there is nobody with other language here, who will speak another language yet.
Female: Yet. laughter
Male: inaudible 01.13
Sébastien: No, I said “SSAC.” Yeah, it’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee. Sorry. And just to… Take a seat please and I will inaudible 1.39 along things just that from many of the AC, I guess it’s the only one… I’m not sure about that, but it’s one of the few that we have a liaison, and it’s Robert Guerra who is participating to the SSAC today and I hope he will join us quicker than later because I think it’s important to have his input also on that issue.
And you have the people on the team, and I will them present themselves. We will not go through the room to present ourselves, but if you want to speak, just give me a hand and make a few words of presentation of who you are.
Okay.
Jeff: Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Jeff Schmidt with JAS Communications.
Male: inaudible 02.50
Jeff: Oh, got it. There we go. Thank you. And I’ll be coordinating the review from our side of the SSAC. With me I have my colleague Bill Yang. Our contact information is up there and I would invite you to please reach out to us at any time with questions, comments, thoughts, concerns, anything that you need us to know.
There is a third member of our team that’s going to be integrally involved in this process, Mr. Dan Distelhorst, and his information is up there as well. But I would encourage you please to feel free to reach out to us with your comments about this review and about the SSAC.
Okay?
Sébastien: Do you have any questions, thoughts about this review? Or do I ask our… You’re invited to make some short presentation on what is a… Okay. Maybe you can… We’re supposed to have read it and even comment on them, but what are the main goals of your review, if you can tell us a little bit about that? Thank you.
Jeff: Sure. So pursuant to the bylaws, these committees are reviewed periodically, first to measure their effectiveness against the currently issued and currently understood mandate, and then to review whether that mandate is still appropriate given the evolving needs of the organization and of the environment in general. So our approach will be first to collect as much data as possible about the SSAC, about their current mandate as seen by the various constituencies, their performance against that mandate again as seen by the various constituencies, and then whether that mandate is still appropriate given the evolving needs of ICANN and the community.
Sébastien: Izumi.
Izumi: I’m a little bit puzzled by looking at the website of the review of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. Is this really updated one or is there some work to be done?
Jeff: I’m not sure. Which website are you looking at, please?
Izumi: The official ICANN website talking about the review.
Jeff: Umm-hmm.
Izumi: Can’t really find the latest.
Jeff: I believe the most recent and relevant mechanism would be to review the ICANN Terms of Reference and the RFP, and I don’t know where those are in the website but I’m sure…
Izumi: Because I tried to the follow the link from the Independent Reviews of the ICANN Structures which showed the review of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. The last update date was June 2007 and the review expected to be launched in January 2008, and there’s no… and they said the ToR will be for the public comment, and I can’t see that at all. So maybe I’m looking at some wrong website, so point me to the right one. Or if not, there’s some problem there. Thank you.
Adam: Can I? You’re looking at the right webpage, Izumi, it’s just that it’s not there. If you go to the announcements and then do a search for SSAC, you will find the link to the Terms of Reference. But I think you’re at the stage where the Terms of Reference are not agreed, is that correct? Or where are you in the stage of developing this review?
Jeff: Sure. So the review officially began November 1st, so we are very early in the process right now. The overall timeline will be between now and the Mexico City meeting, where a draft will be presented. So the general timeline will be between now and roughly the end of the calendar year. We’re going to be soliciting as much input and collecting as much data as possible between the end of the calendar year and Mexico City, we’ll be formulating, developing, and testing hypotheses and preparing for the presentation in Mexico City. And again… And I appreciate you locating the RFC and the Terms of Reference because for all of your reference here, that would be the most relevant and recent ICANN-provided data on this review.
Sébastien: Okay, thank you. You want to follow on?
Izumi: So is there a Terms of Reference already agreed – I’m not too clear – between you and ICANN, or it’s on the way?
Jeff: Yeah, there is one, and in fact it was a part of the RFP. So the reviewer… By design of the review process, the Terms of Reference are created to prior to issuance of the RFP, and the Terms of Reference then become a part of the RFP. So we are not involved in developing the Terms of Reference.
Izumi: But you have made the agreement with ICANN to do the work, right?
Jeff: Yes, that’s correct. Yes, that’s correct.
Izumi: So you’ve got the ToR?
Jeff: Yes.
Izumi: You’ve got the contract with money being paid and stuff like that, right?
Jeff: Yes, that’s correct. Yes.
Izumi: And that information or some part of that is available or not?
Jeff: Yes. So the RFP that we responded to, which includes the Terms of Reference, are available on the announcements page.
Sébastien: Okay. As Robert joined us, I would like to ask him to give us some thought about this participation to the SSAC. He’s the liaison from the ALAC to the SSAC, if I can say it like that. Robert, it’s yours.
Robert: Sure, thank you. I’m probably going to limit my comments to two things. One is, being the liaison to SSAC, how, what process, what took place at the SSAC to get to where we are now, and then kind of issues or comments that were raised about how the review would be seen.
So I think it was maybe at the last meeting, at the Paris meeting or before, the issue that a review was coming up was mentioned to the SSAC committee members on the mailing list and a couple of the calls as well. It was a very collaborative discussion, saying, “Here’s kind of a generic RFP. What are specific things that we should be looking at?” There was a draft made and the draft kind of went back and forth, and then that was sent in terms of… you know, to the official call. So it was very constructive. The comments, if I recall, people have been kind of really happy in terms of kind of the process to get that started.
In terms of issues that have come up, if I recall well, that SSAC members will be interested in getting out of the review is an outreach component of SSAC, because SSAC’s advisories are widely read by the community. They do have, in a way you could say, some sort of force – they’re seen as kind of the expert view. And increasingly there are aspects of advisories that have kind of an education component, and so there’s been some that there’s been some collaboration with ALAC or some input, and sometimes they’ve actually proceeded kind of where ALAC is coming from. And so if SSAC were to see kind of an issue emerging, sometimes it’s public education that will fix the problem to a certain extent, and that’s not their specific mandate.
And so Steve Crocker as chair has been… and a lot of committee members have always wanted SSAC to be very close to its mandate, and whenever something is tangentially brought into scope, someone says, “Okay, this is really outside of our mandate. What do we do?” And when there’s that outreach component, that’s not really seen… it’s seen as something that needs to be done, but to see how a reviewer would kind of see that. And seeing that the ALAC review is also taking place, you might want to see in regards to, you know, how could that be complemented, if there could be some sort of collaboration not only with At-Large and ALAC but with other constituencies in regards to kind of an outreach component as well too.
And so it just kind of get back to the point the advisories are widely read and sometimes for them, you know, for the points really to be listened to, there needs to be kind of stuff done. And so that isn’t particularly their…
And kind of my personal view is, in terms of how the SSAC works, it’s kind of individuals on the committee, it’s a very… there isn’t the amount of messages we see on the At-Large, but for me it’s actually the most effective group that I’ve been working with at ICANN at all. Something needs to be done, they very quickly mobilize, there will be a draft written, people will respond relatively quickly. The people involved are professionals that are working in the field, so I think it’s different than At-Large where we’re volunteers and we’re not just dedicating our work to what we do with At-Large, whereas at SSAC they are, you know, experts and that’s their area so they can spend the time that’s needed.
The issue in regards to participation in some of the meetings is that SSAC, you know, meets at ICANN’s meetings, they have monthly telephone calls, they find a variety of ways of including people, but they also meet outside ICANN meetings. And so there aren’t too many liaisons to the SSAC – I am – and so there are meetings that are held at IETF meetings, and, you know, I’m not at IETF meetings. But people are very good, very approachable, they’ll catch up. I had the opportunity to spend about two and a half hours with Steve Crocker about a couple of weeks ago and they’re just going through a transition now too. And so one of the things you want to take a look at is Steve Crocker’s been heading it for a long time and issues that look into kind of changes in leadership and… that will take place.
But it’s a very effective meeting. I would highly encourage anyone here, if it doesn’t coincide with some of their meetings here, to actually attend some of the SSAC meetings. They are, you know, quite well done, on track. And I know Beau and I have been trying to collaborate, so I think there’s areas of potential more collaboration with the user community and that’s something that could be enhanced. And so looking at how that could be done I think would be useful. So those are kind of my comments for the moment.
Sébastien: Sorry. Go ahead, Vanda.
Vanda: Just remember one good experience we have with some advertise-… some paper they distribute for how to deal with security, and I have the opportunity to make a lot of speeches around in my country and it was very, very interesting in the feedback they gave to the users and the people from the ISPs and these kind of users in the country was very good. So it’s a kind of service they provide that is very interesting to continue to do in my opinion. Thank you.
Sébastien: Nick, you wanted to say something?
Nick: I just wanted to note that Steve Crocker will be here at 11 o’clock on Wednesday during the meeting.
Sébastien: Okay. Thank you, and like that we will be able to ask him how liaison, Board member will work together in one single person. It could be interesting for ALAC in the future.
Robert: Can I just… Just a quick comment. Because Steve Crocker’s been appointed to the Board by NomCom, internally they have selected who will replace him as the liaison, so…
Sébastien: Izumi.
Izumi: Yeah, I have a naïve 16.17 question perhaps to Robert. And given that the liaison and now the evaluators are here, would you like to suggest to us what exactly is the focus of the review that ALAC members or At-Large should also sort of think or consider or, you know…? Because some of them are… they’re technical or administrative that we may not have to at least care that much, so where should we really focus on?
Robert: It’s difficult to compare both. I think – and I’ll honest, maybe a little bit too brutal – is that SSAC is very effective in working together. So it’s a much smaller group. There are no issues of language that come up – all of their discussions are in English, though there are people from all parts of the world and so that’s the common working language. They have a dedicated staff resource, as we do, that they just kind of work in a different way – so they kind of have a Fellow. So it helps them with writing and some of the research. I think they are a more effective body in terms of how they get work done.
Male: inaudible 17.28
Robert: I think it’s very different, because I think they’re a constituency or experts that are paid already that are on the committee, except for me, and so they have time to work on this stuff. There are… They’re all technical experts. When there’s been kind of issues because one person may be with a registry or one of the support companies… I mean, issues are dealt with very, very quickly.
And so, you know, what do we need to worry about? I think it’s very different, dealing with technical experts and dealing with users. And so our complexity is far more difficult. I think that… You know, what is it that we would need to see? I think it just would be useful if Steve is here later this week to actually get his view and comments on At-Large and user. I would say that sometimes they’re also looking out for the interests of internet users as well, and sometimes they make a far better case with technical research to back that up than we do. And so I think that what we can learn from that is that sometimes if we backed up some of our claims with specific cases or incidences, we would be far better off for certain things than the way we do it now.
Jeff?: Robert, if I may, a quick clarification. When you say, “The SSAC dealt with” something, what is that product? Is it a paper or a work product? A meeting? A training? What does that mean to you?
Robert: In most cases it’s an advisory, so if an issue comes up, they will quickly kind of either identify whether it’s something that needs an advisory and they’ll set a time that it’s going to come out and they’ll produce it by a specific meeting or before. If it’s an issue for example in regards to the liaison position… You know, I think it was Steve Crocker very quickly identified that having him the liaison and be a Board member was an issue. He put out a statement and there was basically an election by consensus. And so people… there wasn’t necessarily a vote, people just kind of asked around and then there was a common person’s name that came up. You look at the same things in At-Large and it will take us, you know, a factor of several more times to do some of that things. You know, some of the meetings are closed just to SSAC members, and it’s particularly with security stuff. I think stuff like talking to bu … Yeah.
So just they respond to things. If an issue comes up, if there’s an attack to the DNS… The Kaminsky attack that came up earlier this year, before it was actually in the press, Kaminsky actually briefed the SSAC. They quickly turned around kind of an internal kind of discussion and advisory, and you had to respond when questions came up. And then we’re 20.36 source of input to people who wanted to know more about it. So that type of response when kind of issues come up I think is particularly… they’re particularly effective.
Sébastien: Okay. Thank you very much. Patrick?
Patrick VW: Well, I have a question to Robert. I went through several of these SSAC reports and they’re all pretty good and pretty interesting. I was just wondering do… Like for example there is a report on the impact DNSSEC on broadband routers and firewalls. I mean, it’s something, if you want to survey the market, it’s quite time-consuming. Are the SSAC members doing that themselves or are they contracting this thing outside?
Robert: If I recall well, that advisory took a long time to talk about. First it was identified that IPv6 was a very important thing that a lot of the RRs 21.49 were talking about, and that recognized that for that to be implemented to the end user, all the devices needed to work. And the one thing that was particularly needed are the broadband routers. And so I think it was a survey by the Fellow, who basically wrote a lot of the major producers of the different routers, looked at their websites. So they didn’t contract it out, they had the in-house Fellow I believe do most of the research.
Sébastien: Okay, thank you very much. Do you have to finish this part of the session… Do you have any questions that you would like us as ALAC to answer, if any, now? And if not, you have around the table some people who would be very happy to discuss with you and to answer your questions. I think the last two speakers specifically. I am sure there are others but you need at least to discuss with our two last speakers. Thank you.
Jeff: Thank you, very much.
Sébastien: Okay. We will go to the next item of our agenda. I am a little bit uncomfortable now because it was supposed to be… I was supposed to chair this part of the meeting and not the next one. But yeah, I am very happy. Nick, can you look at Skype please, the discussion between you and me? It will help me, thank you very much. I know that you have things to see and not to see. But I…
Okay, next part was supposed to start 45 minutes earlier. It was titled “Analysis and integration planning of key recommendations of the ALAC Review.” I don’t know who may introduce this topic. Really, Cheryl was supposed to do it and… Okay. What I suggest to do before she joins us back, is to suggest that the session after that, it’s a breakout session and we need to organize in three groups. Maybe what we can do now, it’s to organize those three groups, decide who will be in which group to do go straight on when will have the introduction and the discussion as soon as Cheryl arrives.
Then the three topics are: “Policy advice development process, where can we fast-track?” “Participation and accountability of ALAC members and liaisons,” “Working group outreach activities and grassroots input.”
Female: inaudible 25.14
Sébastien: Yeah. First of all I wanted to be sure that there is no question, and if not… Yeah, Robert.
Robert: Let me suggest that the first one be 1, 2, and 3 – we just go around and ask what number people wish to become, and…
Sébastien: Yeah. First, before to do that, I wanted to be sure that everybody understood what it’s inside 25.40 and what they want… and which one they want to participate. I don’t want to push everybody to understand as a spot all those words and why to go to in one group or another one. But yes, we will do that.
Izumi?
Izumi: Maybe I’m late to catch up again, but by discussing these three broad topics, what was the assumed outcome after that? Is there any agreed direction to take on these to some form, or we just discuss by three groups?
Sébastien: I’m not sure that we just discuss because, for example, there are some documents who start to be published and then we will have to integrate that to our rules or procedures 26.42 for some and how we handle accountability for the ALAC members. Then the goal is to have a working group, and then at the end we will have a report back of each group and to see how it could fit together. We know that it’s closed topic and it could have some overlap, but the idea was really to allow all the participants to say and to participate and to say something on those topics. Now you will have to choose one of the three.
Yeah, Robert.
Robert: Let me just maybe state, I share some of Izumi’s concern as well. I mean, I think it’s good and these issues or the three topics are ones that we should be talking about. I know there’s different things that have been mentioned during the course of this day and some of the calls. But we have this session, then what we do after we’ve discussed for an hour and a half… I think that’s my concern as well. I mean, is it the creation of working groups that will stay after this meeting to work on that topic? Is there… I mean, if we produce a summary after the working group and we present it to the group, what do we do with it? I think it’s important to know that before we start.
Sébastien: Yeah. I am sorry but I think we can spend hours in procedures on how to do what and if it’s done after, but we need to work together and the face-to-face meeting is important, and then if we decide as a group that this work will be handled in this direction, after that it could be better to do it here than to decide that before the work.
Nick, please.
Nick: I may be able to shed some light on this. Firstly, there are three language versions of documents of the first two items that were produced as discussion drafts. The third… We’ll shortly put links… The links are above, but will shortly put the links to these texts next to those items. With regret, the copiers are overwhelmed and we haven’t been able to produce paper versions, but in any case, they’re there in Word. The third item, there is a webpage with the list of current policy working groups and their members, which we will put next to the third item. With respect to the first two, I know Cheryl wishes to see finalized versions of those two documents by the end of this meeting, but there are also two subsequent sessions of the ALAC to finalize each one. So I know that she did not have in mind that you would finish all of the work on those two in an hour and a half but hoped that things would be moved along considerably, but then at the later meetings it could be finished.
Sébastien: Thank you, Nick. Alan?
Alan: Well, first of all, I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s not an hour and a half, it’s three hours, because there’s a second session starting at 4 o’clock. The one in the middle on participation and accountability, there’s an ALAC session scheduled later this week to have some rather in-depth discussion, I would think, and the other topics are in fact closely related to it.
The bottom line is if ALAC is going to start delivering goods and being effective, we have to address all these issues, we have to come to closure on them really soon, and this is an opportunity for people to give some input into this process. If people can’t come up with ideas, then we have a big problem. If we have ideas, then we should be trying to put them together and make some sense of them and end up with processes that work. I think that’s what it comes down to. This is the chance, this is our opportunity face-to-face to discuss these issues.
Sébastien: Thank you, Alan. Before I will give back the chair of the meeting to Cheryl, I would like to go to the end of what we were trying to do. Then the three breaking out sessions, let’s do like it was suggested by Robert, the first line, “Policy advice” and so on, it’s the number one; “Participation and accountability,” it’s number 2; and the “Working group outreach” and so on is number 3.
I would like to ask the participants, the ones who would like to be in the first working group or break out session, please raise your hands now. “Policy advice development process, where can we fast-track?” Vanda. Anybody else? Patrick. Okay, we may be do twice this work.
“Participating and accountability” under number 2, who wants to join that? I will not say… Okay. You see those people, and that’s it. This group, it’s closed.
laughter
Female: inaudible 32.09
Female: Wow!
Sébastien: “Working group outreach activity and grassroots input”? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Okay, I guess this… Anybody else?
Robert?: You’re taking a list of names? No.
Sébastien: Then the people who didn’t answer will be in the first group. Thank you very much. pause
Cheryl, it’s yours.
Cheryl: Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Sébastien. I am making a few guesstimates and assuming that you have yet to have had a finalization on the analysis…
Vanda: No, no, we didn’t.
Sébastien: Sorry, I missed… I need to give you back…
Cheryl: Please. Thank you.
Sébastien: …and giving… We were… We just finished almost SSAC reviewer presentation and discussion, and I was a little bit in difficulty to handle the next session. Then I decided to advance the work for the breaking sessions, that we can go straight on after this session and hopefully you are back…
Cheryl: laughter
Sébastien: …and you will help us – thank you very much – to handle this session, “Analysis and integration planning of key recommendations of the ALAC Review.” Thank you, Cheryl, and sorry for not transmitting well the ship 33.42.
Cheryl: Ah, it’s alright. Being flexible is part of being part of the executive committee, I can assure you. It’s a good tag team. Thank you so much, Sébastien.
What I’d like to do is keep an eye, as you well know, on the end game, which is finishing when we’re meant to today as well as having a profitable and productive meeting. So I would like to propose to you that we have some perhaps 10 or 15 minutes of discussion – nowhere near enough I will admit right now – but that the outcome of our 10 or 15 minutes of discussion on the ALAC review will include a working group that is then going to get on and get on with the business of drafting a response. So if we can spend 10 to 15 minutes now to do that and set some deadlines in that process, I think then we can afford at shall we say 2:30 to move into the breakout sessions as Sébastien has organized. We will however then be having our tea break when our tea break is scheduled.
Okay? So it is going to compress that second session. Do I have agreement on that proposal?
Female: Yeah.
Cheryl: Good. Thank you.
Okay. We did have I believe a quite useful interchange of information this morning with our review working group. However there are 22 recommendations that are going to require a thoughtful analysis and then a consensus response.
Let’s be practical – between now and the 13th of December, we are not going to get every one of 110 ALSes giving us feedback. If we do, I have no problem with that. But what we have around this table are the regional At-Large executive teams and the At-Large Advisory Committee. And perhaps to pre-empt what we may be doing later in our meetings, there are times when we simply have to decide how we come up with a response and who is going to be making the drafts. Providing of course that we can say that it is the executives of the five regions and the At-Large Advisory Committee that are making these comments, then it is also clearly understood that we have not interchanged ideas with every one of our 110 ALSes. However, any smart region – Karaitiana, of course you are listening to this instead of doing your e-mail – would be… laughter …would be reaching out to the 16 or so ALSes, 24 ALSes that they have and getting as many of those who are already active to give feedback on it so that they can bring more than just 3 people’s views.
We highlighted this morning a couple of key points that I think start to go together – 10 and 11, Robert, which you raised, for example. We could possible even subset these to say, “We need to deal with these as a cluster, or these individually.” What I’d like to do now is open the floor to see exactly how you wish to proceed with and endpoint of a working group to operate through this meeting to do some early drafting so that we can leave Cairo with a draft document to go back to our regions and our ALSes to say, “Here is our response to these 22 recommendations. What do you think?”
Yes, Adam, go ahead.
Adam: Can I suggest that today we do not discuss Board seats as was… otherwise that’s all we will discuss?
Cheryl: Not surprisingly I’m very happy to think that we’ve done a fair amount on that, but I will ask the opinion of the group. I see Alan, then I see Robert.
Alan: Well, in response to the last comment, I don’t think we’re having a discussion here in this group at all about the substance. I thought what we’re trying to do is come up with a process by which we can deliver something in a reasonable time and be able to defend that it was a consensus of the various At-Large groups or certainly of the ALAC. To date, we’ve had a hard time just getting consensus of the 15 people on the committee, never mind the people that back them up. So I’m not going to propose something different from Cheryl. I don’t know exactly what will come out up 38.28 in 7 minutes from now, whenever the deadline is. But I think coming out of this meeting, it would be nice to have a draft. At the very least we need at least a five-person working group, one from each region, who will commit to having a draft in two weeks or something like that, or in a week – whatever it is – that we then have an opportunity to pass by the other committee members, the RALOs, and to the extent the RALOs want to and can consult with their ALSes, then they should.
Cheryl: Robert?
Robert: I’m going to echo some of the comments but a slightly different way. I think that… What I found was useful with the interaction with the Board Governance Committee is that they were actually asking us for guidance and suggestions on some very specific points that they either have not built into the proposal yet or would like our comment so they could incorporate it. In regards to the Board seats, I don’t think there was a question from them whether that should be in or not. The question that they asked is “What about mechanisms?” and how would we select that. And I think that’s a criteria that if we… you know. So I think for some of the other points, they asked those type of questions as well.
So I think, you know, there should be… You know, the group that we set up, a working group that works on this that might want to go through each of the questions and identify where there are specific points that the Board Governance Committee raised, that they want specific clearance on… or comments on. Are there specific points that we would like to contribute? So the issue of point 10 and 11, you know, if we want to try to work in language… For point 10 and 11, I mean, my suggestion would be if we know of others that are trying to represent users in one way or another, we may want to consult them and try to get that feedback into our session. So if that’s been identified as also having come up in the GNSO meeting yesterday, we should be briefed on what that comment was.
But, you know, I’m specifically thinking… I mean, my two issues I think for this is we need a group, hopefully for more than one region, the issue of mechanism and strategic planning for me are kind of key ones that we should put in there, and it’s a short timeline, and so, you know, what I would really probably suggest is that if there’s a group that’s interested in working in this, that they try to meet informally outside of the sessions, maybe for breakfast or something like that, and just start some of the process and maybe update us later in the week as to what progress they’ve been able to do.
Cheryl: Alan?
Alan: I’m going to disagree with one of the things Robert said, of I think anything’s on the table for us to comment on. If they’ve asked questions, we should certainly try to answer them. On the other hand, if we think one of their recommendations is dead wrong then we should say so. And whether that’s about Board seats or strategic planning or whether we use wikis or not, you know, if we think that they got it wrong then this is our opportunity to tell them, because otherwise it’s going to show up in the final report.
Cheryl: We have a speaking order but we are running open meetings here and I will take any opportunity for a guest and interested person in the At-Large world to speak. So please, Schombe 41.59, if you’d like to take the floor?
Translator: I don’t speak English very well. I’m going to tell you about my problem in French. I come from the Congo, Kinshasa. I am ALS, so I’m a member of ICANN. I have a major preoccupation and I thought that here in Cairo we were going to meet all the ALS and discuss certain aspects of our problems. There are many changes, but these changes cannot be discussed between ALS because we don’t know each other well enough. This is an aspect of the matter which really preoccupies us.
Another aspect is that every time we meet in the committee, the ALAC committee, that’s fine. And again, ALAC is important. But the third point, the one… the working group you’re referring to and the outreach activities and grassroots gives us a very important aspect because we’re always exerting an effort to put it at 43.11 a national level in our countries. What would be important is first of all to exchange information and data between the ALS to know what is happening in each country so that we can have a viable document which we submit to the committee. This is an aspect which has been preoccupying us a lot.
So the question, what are the measures that are being taken by the committee to allow ALS to exchange between themselves and regularly viable data to be presented to the committee? Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you. I do have a speaking order. In response to that, of course… Two things there. It is unfortunate in many ways that the At-Large Summit did not occur as planned in Paris and that we have a mismatch perhaps in timing, but we work with what we have. That said, part of what we are doing in later meetings here is looking at exactly that dynamic, of how we can best facilitate networking, not only between ourselves as an ALAC but between the regions – and of course bringing the Regional At-Large Organizational Secretariats together is a very important part of that and one which I will mourn any reduction of quite seriously. But there’s that next layer, which is networking within the region and I think specifically in our responses on this matter, to 10 and 11, points 10 and 11, that’s an ideal comment to drive back home. So thank you very much.
I see Izumi, I see Carlton, and I do have Alan. Did you want to come back in earlier? Okay. Alan, Carlton, Izumi.
Alan: ALAC certainly has a place to play in the role of interchange, but I think the first player there is the RALO – that is the organization that is coordinating the countries within a region, often with more of a common language base and common environmental situations. So if the RALO is not actively trying to encourage communication between ALSes within a region, there’s nothing that we’re going to be able to do at the ALAC level. I think first level, it’s a RALO responsibility and either the RALO has to do that properly or they’re not doing their job.
Cheryl: Carlton.
Carlton: Just two comments. The first comment is I truly believe that if there is anything in this report that… overtalking 45.49
Fatimata?: Carlton, excuse me. Translation is not working. pause
Male: Speak up.
Carlton: Okay. Is it back? Yes?
Yes. So I was saying that if we believe that there is anything in this report that we disagree with, I think it is right and proper for us to say we disagree and say it clearly – that’s the first thing.
With respect to the RALOs and their responsibility for RALOs and the ALSes, I quite agree. In the region, it is the RALO, which consists of ALSes… I mean, sometime I hear it mentioned here as if the RALO is a separate organization. The RALO exists because they are constituted with ALSes, not the other way around. laughter And so Alan, I agree. It is the RALO, which is constituted by ALSes, that is responsible for the regional integration and we have various mechanisms to do that.
In terms of going forward here, might I just suggest there are certain themes, there are certain themes that you see coming out in the report, and I think it would be useful for us not just say, “We disagree with this” but look at the themes, pull out the themes and respond thematically. I believe that would be helpful.
Cheryl: Izumi.
Izumi: Yeah, I’d like to echo or agree with what Alan suggested and Robert that we should do as much as possible in this week in taking the opportunity, and hopefully using both face-to-face as well as wiki or mailing list interaction with a working group more than once. And maybe also divide into sort of three areas, for example, of the report to have a little bit more sort of, you know… don’t know 48.01 effective participating from all. And I can do part of the work so long as I’m on the ALAC.
Cheryl: Any other comments at this stage?
In which case we need to move to the formation of a regionally diverse and representative working group that is going to function for having while… Let me try and get my English at least vaguely in terms of a sentence. Try again. That the function of the working group will be to work together during the Cairo meeting out of session, to present to us an early draft by close of our third session meeting, and to in two weeks’ time have a draft response for the wider community, however each RALO wishes to do that, and the At-Large Advisory Committee to review. Obviously, there’s going to be themes and I do believe that a themic response is a very healthy thing, but we must go far further than saying “Yes” or “No,” or “What about this?” It needs to be an in-depth analysis, and if you put your hand up for this committee, you will be making a commitment but an enormously important contribution. This is, ladies and gentlemen, the single most important piece of work we have ever had to deal with. This is how we will or will not survive. So take this very, very seriously. This is not pushing individual agendas, this is what is best for all.
That said, and picking up on the point that was made I think particularly by Alan, I wonder if we should not ensure that we have a RALO lead from each region involved in this committee at the very least. So if we’re talking about the RALOs being made up of the ALSes, I would like to not see this be just an ALAC subcommittee – I think we need five people, and from RALOs, and one or two ALAC people in it.
Go ahead, Robert.
Robert: I’ll just maybe use a different terminology. People from At-Large should be involved, whether they’re ALAC, ALSes, or RALOs, but anyone from At-Large that’s interested, I think it would be good to get them involved.
Cheryl: Can I ask exactly when are they going to get involved if this work is being done during Cairo? Ah, thank you. Since when you talk of “At-Large,” it usually involves a much wider list, and certainly At-Large is not widely represented here.
Yeah, go ahead, Alan.
Alan: I’m not sure if I’m supporting Robert or against it. I would like to see the lead person from each region be either an ALAC member or one of the RALO executive, or whatever the expression is. I would not say… I would not support saying, “It must be a RALO person.” We’ve got three ALAC members and 1, 2, 3, 4 executive people from each RALO. I don’t mind which it is. If it’s the NomCom elected person, they’re obviously going to have to work closely with the RALO people. You know, we’re not talking about a different solitude with a wall between them. But whoever’s better positioned to put the time into it and to express things well, I’m not going to reject that person because they don’t happen to have the RALO stamp on their forehead. As the NomCom person from North America who doesn’t intend to volunteer for this, I can say this with impunity. laughter
Cheryl: laughter Go ahead, Robert.
Robert: I’ll just switch back and maybe getting to something more constructive. The idea that Izumi put together or suggested, that the document be sectioned into particular things and different groups work on different sections, I think is a good one. Given the times I’ve spoken on this topic, I’m more than happy to participate in this and would suggest that, you know, I meet my fellow colleagues who might want to be interested in this at 8 o’clock tomorrow for breakfast.
Cheryl: How the working group cuts up its work is of little need for discussion here. It’s the working group’s business to do what they do. I’m interested in the outcome, and that’s a draft by the close of our meeting on Wednesday. I hear there that we have a North American regional representative putting their hand up. I s-…
Vanda: I can… 53.05
Cheryl: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re going to busy enough. I saw Carlton. He was quicker.
Vanda: No, no, Carlton…
Cheryl: But you two fight it out. Okay. So we have Vanda. Okay, good.
Vanda: Carlton is… overtalking 53.15
Cheryl: We have Carlton. laughter Okay. Latin America is sorted. Then we need to look at Asia Pacific. Izumi? Thank you. AFRALO?
Male: inaudible 53.29
Cheryl: Sorry. Oh, excellent…
Male: May I suggest by close of business today we have the names inaudible?
Cheryl: Okay. I only had to weed out EURALO and we were finished, but yes. If you’d come back with a list…
Male: inaudible
Cheryl: Okay. If you come back with a list after the afternoon break, that will be excellent.
Alright. Any oth-…
Male: What do we mean by close of business Wednesday or inaudible 53.55?
Cheryl: Close of our meeting on Wednesday.
Male: I thought I heard inaudible.
Cheryl: No. Early draft then because there’s no guarantee… we will not be gathering again necessarily as a whole after that. Clustering in the back rooms, in the back of the room in the public forum, yeah, but not as a meeting.
Okay. Any further points wishing to be made on this matter? If not, I look forward to seeing the list of the working group. And obviously we will give them whatever support is required and any printing, etc., that needs to be done, I gather it would be Marie-Helénè or yourself. Who do we give them to work with? Matthias, or…?
Nick: Any of us.
Cheryl: And of you. You can work with any of the staff you like. They’re at your beck and call. Okay.
Alan: There were copies of the interim report given out to the GNSO… overtalking 54.53
Cheryl: Microphone please.
Vanda: Microphone.
Cheryl: Microphone. Can you repeat to the microphone?
Alan: There were paper copies of the interim report given out at the GNSO. There may well be a pile somewhere, that we can just make sure every working group person has a piece of paper.
Cheryl: Adam, do you want me to type back what we have just done or is this a sigh?
Adam: It’s a sigh. We’ve just spent 40 minutes deciding something that I don’t particularly understand rather than just doing it. What on earth are we doing?
Cheryl: Welcome to the ALAC.
Adam: No, that’s not the right answer, Madame Chair. That’s not the right answer. What are we doing? We spent 40 discussing something ’round and around in circles when we’re going to have a study group on something, when we’ll do it at some other time. Why are we sitting in this room?
Cheryl: I really don’t believe I’m in a position to answer that because my biases will become obvious. Sébastien, go ahead.
Sébastien: We are in front of us during this week to handle a lot of topics, and for that we need to be… to have a fast 56.07 exchange between this group and then to have a working group on this matter, on the other matters also we will have to deal with. And that’s the way we need to work collectively because we can also decide that we need to pick up one in each region to do the work about the ALAC review, for example, and we ask each region to give a name. But we also need to have exchange because this group needs to live together, and even if it’s painful…
Male: inaudible 56.39
Sébastien: …it’s necessary.
Cheryl: Moving on now, Sébastien, as you had organized the breakout groups, I’m assuming you are going to geographically around the room sort of cluster into three groups, if you’d like to take back over and randomly allocate space.
Sébastien: Okay. What I suggest, that group number 3 in that direction… You want the name of the group?
Male: Yes, please.
Sébastien: Okay. That’s the “Working groups outreach…” Sorry. No inaudible 57.20.
Male: inaudible show up on that screen, whoever inaudible.
Sébastien: “Working group outreach activity and grassroots inputs” on the right hand corner, on the table, round table. The “Participation and accountability of ALAC members and liaison,” that’s the second group, on the left corner. And the first group, “Policy advice development process, where can we fast-track?” we’ll organize here around this end of the table. We will put chairs on the other side of the table.
Thank you very much. And a long time we have to handle this just to give us a handle for this process.
Cheryl: We need to finish at the start time of 3:30 where the afternoon break is scheduled. That can… Of course, you can go 5 or 10 minutes in, but it is your afternoon break that you’re going into. And I will just let the translation service know that their services will not be required again until 4 o’clock when we return from our afternoon break.
End of Audio
ALAC/At-Large Policy and Planning OneDay #4 – Cairo ICANN Meeting – Part 3
(Held November 02, 2008)
Legend
Name: First name of member of group
Name L: First name plus first initial of last name if there's more than one person with the same first name.
Name?: If we think we might know who's speaking but aren't 100% sure.
Male: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a male.
Female: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a female.
Name: 52 - 0.31.06 We will identify a foreign language in square brackets with a time code for the beginning and end, so that you can quickly identify those passages. At the top of the transcript, we will advise you of the name(s) of the foreign languages you'll need to search for. For example, some transcripts may contain German, so you'll have to search for “[German” instead of “[French” to find all the passages. The speaker identification is the same convention as all the others. i.e. If we know the speaker's name we'll include it, otherwise we'll put a question mark after it, or if we can't even guess, then Male, Female or SP.
Interpreter. If interpreter actually translates French or German for a participant we will note it as “Interpreter”. It will normally be evident from the dialogue who the interpreter is translating for. If not, we will include a note in square brackets with respect to who they are translating for.
cuts out: Audio cuts out for less than 2 seconds. We may have missed something. We do not put this if it's just natural silence where no-one is speaking. We only put this if we can hear that there was briefly a technical problem with the phone line and/or the recording which resulted in temporary loss of sound.
********************************************************************************************************
List of Participants
Important Note: Please note that this should not be considered to be an "official" list of the attendees. This is just a list of the participants that we were able to identify during the transcription. There may have been others present that didn't speak and some people may have participated that were not on the official list of attendees published on the internet.
Aguirre, Carlos
Aizu, Izumi
Ashton-Hart, Nick (ICANN Staff)
Bachollet, Sébastien
Brendler, Beau
Cade, Marylin (President’s Strategy Committee)
Dandjinou, Pierre (President’s Strategy Committee)
El Bashir, Mohamed
Greenberg, Alan
Langdon-Orr, Cheryl (ALAC Chair)
Länsipuro, Yrjö (President’s Strategy Committee)
Leibovitch, Evan
Ludwig, Wolf
Morris, Jacqueline
Muehlberg, Annette
Peake, Adam
Samuels, Carlton
Scartezini, Vanda
Schombe, Baudouin
Seye Sylla, Fatimata
Vande Walle, Patrick
Xue Hong
********************************************************************************************************
Sébastien: …on what are the main points they discuss or conclude or whatever, and where they want to go from that discussion. I would like to do the three groups before the arrival of the PSC people. And if we need to discuss again, we will say to do that after the PSC people left the room.
Who will be… I will take the reverse order and start by the third group. Who will be the rapporteur of the…
Female: Jacqueline. Jacqueline.
Sébastien: …working group?
Female: You have to report on what we did.
Jacqueline: Yeah. Well, I’m just getting…
Female: Okay. laughter
Sébastien: Okay.
Male: inaudible 00.50
Sébastien: Who will be the rapporteur of the second group, “Participation and accountability of ALAC members and liaisons”? It’s you? Okay.
And who will be the rapporteur of the first group, “Policy advice development process”?
Vanda: I guess we didn’t decide, but I can do.
Sébastien: Who wants to do this?
Female: Vanda.
Sébastien: Okay. I see that Vanda will be candidate for that. Thank you, Vanda.
Then the group number 3’s not ready. May I ask you, Carlton, to start? Is it feasible?
Carlton: inaudible 1.33
Sébastien: Okay, great. Thank you very much. pause The mic is to you. Thank you.
Carlton: Thank you, Sébastien. We… Our group, working group was about participation and accountability. A couple of things: Generally we are resolved that the proposal that was floated about accountability is not fit for purpose. We believe that the situation can be improved if we begin with the original one-page document that speaks to participation and accountability as a starting point, and we expand on that to take into consideration other elements of the committee, such as the RALOs and the liaisons as part of the accountability and participation framework.
The members believe that while we see the necessity of keeping statistics on meeting attendance and so on, we should be careful not equate volume with quality. And therefore we would strongly recommend that the statistics may be used only as a guide, but certainly not as part of any punitive operations. The consensus of group as that, with regard to participation and accountability, the premise is more subjective than objective or quantitative. And we should therefore seek the opportunity to embrace that framework.
In keeping with that, we are recommending specifically that if we amend rule 21 of the previous document and drop the Cairo document, we would get to a better position. We believe that in terms of the intervention in the event that we believe there are problems of participation, the framework as exists now ought to be amended. And the amendment I’m going to ask Izumi to read directly what we’re proposing.
Izumi?
Izumi: Okay. Umm…
sound of microphone feedback
Male: I don’t 04.49 support that.
laughter
Izumi: I finish.
laughter
Izumi: Okay. The one we agree, this is sort of a rough consensus thing so don’t read the details of the wordings, but essentially we’d like to propose a friendly amendment to the 21.10: “In case an ALAC member or a liaison is approaching to fail to meet the requirements” – which was defined before – “the community should attempt to resolve the problem in an appropriate manner. If this community approach does not work, the Chair will contact the person and directly 05.38 and discuss the matter. If these attempts still don’t work, the Chair will consult with RALO or NomCom that selected the person for possible actions. In the extreme case, the Chair in consultation with other ALAC members will privately encourage the member to resign. If this does not happen by 14 days from the communication the Chair formally notified the entity responsible for appointing the member, then the message may be copied to the public ALAC list and ask that the appointment is immediately reconsidered.” We agreed to set the liaison’s criteria, which we haven’t done yet.
So we take a very friendly approach to encourage the improvement of the performance before denying him or her to let decide 06.33 on one criteria thing. That’s sort of the spirit of our agreement.
Carlton: Just to mention that we believe before all this can go in place, we should have a prerequisite. The prerequisite is that we should have job descriptions for the various layers and we should as part of that job description give an expectation of performance, what is required for the position. So those are prerequisites to any of this that we are suggesting here.
I think that’s it. Thank you.
Sébastien: Thank you very much, Carlton and Izumi. I just would like to ask if there are any clarification questions, not on the substance but just clarification. And if not, I would like to suggest that Jacqueline, you do… No, it’s not Jacqueline?
Female: No, inaudible 07.30. Sorry.
Sébastien: I was thinking it was a Latin America show this evening. No, Europe is coming in the… Okay.
laughter
Vanda: Europe always there.
Sébastien: Okay. Sorry, it’s your…
Wolf: No, we are just improving the diplomatic relations between the RALOs in Latin America and Europe, and in intensifying our contacts 07.55, we decided to share our presentation.
I just will do a short summary on what we discussed in our part. We first of all concentrated on some basic questions and clarifications and definitions about outreach and what outreach potentially means. In this context, the question is who are finally the users we are always talking about or we pretend to represent? These are some key questions. We have to be clear when defining “outreach.” Another important point was besides the opportunities for outreach, there are always a lot of expectations – sometimes very high expectations – on what outreach could achieve or not.
Besides this introduction and these clarifications we discussed on some structural requirements which are needed or which are essentials for any outreach activities such as the necessary means or budget allocations to do outreach in the particular regions. There were three main points mentioned in this context, structural requirements. There was a budget committee of ALAC installed about two years ago which tried to assess the means and requirements for the structures, for the working structures of ALAC and the RALOs. There was a suggestion – as a second point – to provide a grant, a kind of grant for outreach activities, and RALOs or ALSes could apply to ICANN for this grant on the basis of specific outreach projects, and if they are approved, the budget would be allocated to those outreach projects. And the third point was there should be a kind of equal opportunities among the different RALOs.
The third point was the opportunities, and Jacqueline will go into some more specific details of opportunities. I will just repeat two main points for such outreach opportunities. One prerequisite should be that outreach needs to be part of regional activities – they can’t be… they can differ from region to region but each RALO has to follow up precisely what’s going on in the particular region, and they need to have all the contacts in their region, and they have to be part of ongoing regional activities.
RALOs should also have the authority to decide on their own priorities. The priorities of RALOs cannot around the globe be all the same. This depends very much on the regional particularities and cultural, language, whatsoever circumstances. And there is a variety of outreach opportunities, and it’s Jacqueline who will now go into this specific details because LACRALO and AFRALO had already some experience in this direction.
Jacqueline: Okay. Some of the things that were considered. Partnering – for example, ARIN and AfriNIC are two organizations that consistently have meetings and they’re very, very good at bringing people. So if we partner with them, then we may be able to access more… do some outreach and access people that we would not r-… or organizations that we would not normally get.
The use of our own networks, our personal business networks, and the main thing is the ability of each of us to deliver. So it would be an idea of having more personal responsibility for the outreach.
We need more information that we can use. Now one of the things that has come up several times is the idea of sharing among the regions. If, for example, one region has a presentation that they’ve created on IDNs and they submit it for everyone to access, other people may be able to translate it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Chinese, whatever language, so that all of us would have access to material to be able to use that. And that’s come up several times but I am pretty sure that Nick can get that done very, very quickly in a wiki format type thing – a repository where we can just all submit documents.
And very importantly, the idea of having small workshops for end users in our native languages. For example, have a very small… have a small workshop in… subregional, not the big, huge regional summit-type things, but subregional workshops where your can get 4-, 5-, 600 people maybe to come in and educate them on specific issues.
And piggybacking on other events. So if anyone is currently going to a conference, we can get them to get to go on the repository, get a presentation, and do that in that event, so we can do it with less… fewer resources.
And that’s pretty much it, the main issues and ideas that we came up with.
Wolf, was there anything I left out? Okay.
Sébastien: Okay. Thank you very much for this new team effort for… pause
Nick: I just wanted to note late breaking amendment to the schedule is a meeting was requested with the President’s Strategy Committee and it was impossible to find a time that worked for this group and that group. But two of the members will come here for a half an hour between 4:30 – which is in 10 minutes – and 5 o’clock to speak about the… to have a dialogue with you about the Improving Institutional Confidence process.
Sébastien: Okay, thank you. The last group.
Annette: Excuse me.
Sébastien: Sorry, okay.
Annette: Concerning this pe-… Oops. Where is Pierre, because I met him, so he’s here. He will attend that meeting too?
Sébastien: I… He’s not available at that time. I told him about the fact that we wanted to have a meeting with the PSC. I didn’t know the schedule completely but I told him that it must 16.43 be this afternoon, and he told me he had a meeting up to 6. But he will definitely join us later to discuss that issue with us and one on another moment at least with the group who will be set up to formalize the ALAC position on that issue. But I sent him a mail as soon as I get the final hour to him, and he is aware now. Or if he read his mail, he is aware. I don’t know in which room he is and I can’t… I was not able to… But if you find him before, he’s welcome, no problem.
Thank you. Now we are to go to the last breakout session working group – that’s “Policy advice development process,” and it’s Vanda. Thank you.
Vanda: Okay. Our job was talking about fast track, so I will do fast track. So we talk about translation issues, but it’s a side issue in this subject, but it’s important to have that discussion.
One thing that we decided is we need to have again the working groups working and to push for this process, because we need to have experts around the globe to advise us in many issues, to accelerate issues 18.31. And this is not a matter of regional expertise because there is a lot of issues there is no interest in some region and it has a huge interest in another region. So the working groups need to be populated by experts, not really only regional division or something like that.
There’s… But in many case, we need to have a fast fast track. The fast track is eight weeks – it’s far from fast. laughter So sometimes we need to have some feedback, to give some feedback in one week, or, I don’t know, in 48 hours. And we need to confine this to the executive committee. What haven’t done in this debate is to define properly when is it convenient to use the fast track, the fast fast track, and the fast fast fast track…
laughter
Vanda: …because we need to put numbers on that, you know? If we need to give some feedback in one week, which will be the best solution? Of course it’s not going through the whole process.
Another issue that came up was that we don’t need to wait to post issues on the website just because we have a process started. So we could post that, it was there, people can have time to read them. And in some time, we, you know, have a flag and say, “Well, now we have one month to finish” or “We have 45 days to finish that.” And the flag will be put on the web after… in some time after the people have the opportunity to read that.
That is some of the problems we raised here, and certainly we need to go deeply on that and put some really process, when and why, and the most important issue, how we’re going to make the working groups around the RALOs, the ALS, to really work and give us advice. That is very, very important for the process itself and to give more complete and more diverse opinions about any issue to ICANN. I guess that’s it.
Sébastien: Thank you, Vanda.
Cheryl: Hong?
Sébastien: Another member of the group want to add something?
Cheryl: Hong?
Vanda: Something?
Cheryl: Hong, you wish to sp-…?
Vanda: Something else?
Hong: I guess Vanda gave a perfect summary of our discussions and covered the most important issues. Just one supplement – that is with respect fast track, to make sure it is really fast. We sort of 22.41 believe it would be helpful to make the executive committee to delegate a working group when making the announcement of a policy documents and just streamline the pers-… cuts out
Sébastien: Okay. Any questions, clarifications?
Okay. Then what I suggest, we have three minutes, and just to come back to what is the schedule for after then. We will have two members of the Presidential Strategy Committee who will come to us, and the goal, it’s really to discuss where they are and we have questions or inputs we want to make. It’s not an official consultation by the PSC itself to the ALAC, it’s more informal discussion. And we think it’s an important topic that ALAC must handle also in the next few days. It’s why I think it’s important to have this exchange with those two people. As I already say, if we are able to have Pierre Dandjinou with us, it will be great. If not, I hope that we will have time to find… to discuss with him in a small group or individual, but it’s important also. And on the wiki, there is a link to the information page. So 24.18 it’s in different languages, you can see there. And I think we need to set up a working group to take care of first draft of answer or participation of the ALAC on that subject.
I would like to know if there are people who participate through any of the regional meetings set up by ICANN on that topic in the last… since the Paris meeting? pause Okay.
Female: inaudible 24.53
Sébastien: The regional meeting on ICC on…
Cheryl: inaudible …on Improving Institutional Confidence.
Vanda: Improving Institutional… Yeah. I just… I don’t know if some of those have an opportunity to follow by the web the presentation. I heard Peter and Paul and all the guys in the web, it was a very good one.
Sébastien: Okay. Why I’m putting that on the table is that first of course we have many things to do but it was… I went to the Geneva meeting and it was a very interesting meeting, and in the same time there are a lot of things on the website, the registration of the conference that you can go and watch, there a lot of documents in different languages and they were doing a meeting in each region – that’s a good improvement for ICANN I think. Then… And do you, any of you participate at the meeting in Paris on that subject?
Hong: Of course I didn’t participate the Paris one, I participated at the Geneva one.
Male: inaudible 26.09
Hong: Alright. That’s not the regional meeting, it’s not in Asia.
Cheryl: If I may, Sébastien, a desired outcome at the end of this small amount of time with the representatives of the PSC committee is that in our joint meeting between… joint meeting with – not between, with – the support organizations and the advisory committees of the ICANN, which is a new experiment which has not being done before, we will be addressing two topics – that is new gTLDs including IDN ccTLDs, and we will be addressing the PSC.
Now we’re not going to be discussing the context and having new deliberations. What we are trying to elicit out of Monday’s meeting is where are the mutual points of agreement, disagreement or concern – not to come up with the solutions but to send a very clear message, if one exists, that says, for example in the matter of new gTLDs, I would assume when someone asks me, “What does the ALAC and the At-Large community have as a concern with this process?” I’ll be saying, “We still are concerned about morality and public order. We still want to talk about that. We still want to talk about…” and then I need to fill in this, this, and this. With the PSC, we need to know from you, do we want to talk about it all? Is there any concern you have? Is there any comment you have? Or are you delightfully happy with the motherhood 28.10 statements it makes? It’s at that level, not a drill-down analysis or, you know, trying to wordsmith things.
So that’s very much what we want to have happen at the end of this half hour, is for us to be able to say, “Really, we don’t have any comment” if that’s the case, or “The comments we would like to make or the points we would like to discuss further or what we will be looking at in the future is…” I think the new gTLDs is going to take the lion’s share of our interest, but we cannot ignore the PSC.
Thank you, Sébastien.
Sébastien: Thank you, Cheryl. Alan.
Alan: Sorry. Just a clarification – are you saying at the end of this coming half hour, we should have come up with the list of things that are our concern to raise in the joint meetings? I thought this was a meeting to discuss things with the reps from the PSC, not to deliberate on our own.
Cheryl: No, it’s not a deliberation exercise at all. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. At the end of a discussion… Look, I’m not going to ask how many of you have read it, how many of you have formed an opinion. There is an opportunity in the next half hour for opinions to be formed and you to, at least if not read it, picked up one or two items along the way. Based with that foundation, we have a small chance of getting a list created. Does that make better sense?
Alan: I think in the very least in the next minute or two, someone should post a URL so each of us could be flipping through it if we haven’t already.
Cheryl: It’s… Okay, I’ll copy it. It’s on the wiki, but I’ll copy it across now.
Male: inaudible 29.55
Cheryl: It’s there.
Sébastien: I put it on the wiki already.
Cheryl: It’s on the wiki, but…
Male: inaudible
Cheryl: That’s alright. I’ll get it across as well.
Sébastien: Okay, inaudible time.
Alan: Luckily the wiki is small enough, that means we can all find it quickly.
Cheryl: Yeah, it’s going to be there in half a moment.
Sébastien: Okay, perfect time.
Cheryl: So…
Sébastien: We are very happy…
Cheryl: Welcome.
Sébastien: We are very happy to have two of the members of the PSC. And I really want to thank them because… on so short notice to be able to come. I want to reiterate that the idea, it’s not to have a consultation in any means but to have an exchange of… to have an exchange of thoughts, of ideas, of… We will ask them where they are and how was the different meetings in each region, and if they have any wishes more precisely on what ALAC could contribute to this work. I will let them introduce themselves, and each one of you want to talk, just introduce quickly yourself also and we will go like that.
It’s translated and some of our members will speak in French or… and in Spanish, but you have the translation tools.
Thank you very much. Who would like to start? Okay. Marylin, thank you.
Marylin: Well, first of all, I’m Marylin Cade, and I want to say what a pleasure it is to have a chance to come and talk to you.
We are here in our individual capacity, which you always hear from the PSC members when they come to speak to you, but let me reiterate it. And I say that because I am then going to say how important I think it is, and I’m sure that Yrjö will agree with me, how important it is that you individually take a look at the PSC documents and think about what your individual comments. And I say that because the PSC consultation is an ICANN-wide consultation. Not all consultations at ICANN are ICANN-wide. Some are about policy and they are therefore, you know, about the GNSO or the ccNSO, but this is one of those consultations that is ICANN-wide and it is in my view the most important significant consultation that we can be engaged in right now, because we are talking about what it’s going to take to meet the expectations of the community to take ICANN forward into the future as the stable, trusted steward of the unique identifiers of the internet.
So I’m not going to say a whole lot more because I’d like to be here to listen, but just to say there are some opportunities for input and opportunities to ask more questions. And maybe we can spend a little time talking about that and about how you feel that you can be supported to be able to participate more effectively as the consultation continues.
Yrjö: Yes, good afternoon. My name is Yrjö Länsipuro. I’m the GAC representative from Finland. And I just want to echo what Marylin said, how happy we are that we can be here with you and listen to you and to answer your questions. I assume that that’s why we are here and not so much to talk because you have all read the documents I hope and we’re really looking forward to your questions and your comments. Thank you.
Marylin: And we have one more person to introduce. Maria, Maria Farrell, who is providing staff support to the PSC and is our go-to person on knowing where documents are and where the process is, and let me enlist her support – if we don’t know the answer, we’ll turn to her.
laughter
Sébastien: Thank you, Marylin. Thank you, Yrjö. And I am sure that she has all the information and all the answers. We can rely on her for the future of ICANN. You wanted to add something, Marylin? Go ahead.
Marylin: cuts out …you’d ask if we’d say a few words about what’s happened to date
Cheryl: Umm-hmm. Please.
Marylin: So let me try that. The President’s Strategy Committee was announced in Wellington at the ICANN meeting, and the purpose of the President’s Strategy Committee is to advise on issues that are strategic to ICANN’s future. So about a year ago when the US Department of Commerce… not quite a year ago now when the US Department of Commerce announced the Notice of Inquiry, which is a terms used by governments very often, a formal inquiry about the feedback from the community about the Joint Project Agreement with ICANN, the President… sorry, the Chairman of the Board of ICANN, Peter Dengate Thrush, tasked the PSC with devising and carrying forward on a public consultation with the community.
So we began that work. There’s a number of documents. They’re very high-level and we have heard a lot of feedback and the course of the feedback about getting down to the nitty gritty and providing more details to people. So, you know, happy to hear more about that.
There are five or six key areas that we are addressing: freedom from capture, accountability… I’m going to have…
Yrjö: Internationalization.
Marylin: Sorry. And they are on the… Yes. But the process has involved publishing the documents, taking comments… We have not received as many comments as we would like to receive – I’ll say more about that in just a minute – but we have done a number of regional outreach meetings, and I am going to describe them as “outreach meetings” because for the most part the meetings we can conducted were held in conjunction with another existing meeting and they fit into the schedule of that additional meeting, and that meant they were limited in time, but it was very important to have them because that gave us geographic reach into interacting with the community around the world to at least begin to get the word out and draw attention to the importance of participation.
We held a three-… So we held a brief meeting at LACNIC, we held a meeting is Christchurch, New Zealand in conjunction with APNIC, we held a meeting in Africa in conjunction with a security workshop, we held a brief meeting in Geneva on the edge of the IGF public consultation, and we held a three-hour public consultation in Washington, DC.
That meeting in Washington, DC was attended by close to 200 people and had a wide diversity of commenters. There is a transcript available on that.
The first round of public consultation elicited 22 responses, written responses, and the last round got 14, I think.
So where we are is we are trying to take the comments we’ve received on those six categories and mull through them and take feedback from the community. So, for instance, let’s take a topic – freedom from capture. And the PSC put out some ideas: “Is this the right approach to… Is this the right definition of ‘capture’?” and “Is this the right action to prevent capture?” The feedback from the community is “Mmm, you guys didn’t get it quite right. You focussed on capture by contracted parties.” And many people in the community said, “We’re very worried about a wide range of other forms of capture. That could be because there’s not broad enough participation. We’re worried about captured from international organizations. We’re…”
So we got a lot of feedback about what we hadn’t addressed. So where we are now is trying to take the input we got and to say, “Okay, we need more activities. We need to think about other things that should be done.” Similar activities on almost all of them. I would say the consistent message we’ve got is the community would like us to do something besides publish the headlines and the subtitles.
laughter
Marylin: They want us to write a few paragraphs, is that fair?
Yrjö: Sure, sure. Yeah. But I think that we’re almost at the end of what we call “analysis phase” now. I mean, we have lots of information and analyzing them, and I think that basically those areas, five areas Marylin mentioned, I think that there is a pretty wide consensus that these are actually the most important topics to worry about. And then we have to go onto the design 40.17, I mean, what to do about those concerns, and then eventually of course implementation if this thing is going forward.
But I would like to say that also I see us today at the intersection of what has been so far a pretty much top-down approach, and what I hope from now on, with these meetings we are going to have in Cairo, we’ll a bottom-up process which is of course absolutely necessary.
Marylin: One other thing. We published five areas. In the course of the consultation, we’ve actually been reminded of the sixth area. And the sixth area is maintaining the commitment to the bottom-up, consensus-based model, private sector-led model that ICANN was founded on. And it was interesting because, as the PSC members, we just thought that was given, but many people in their comments started to… really reinforced the commitment to…
And maybe I should say something. “Private sector”… At the time that ICANN was founded, pre-WSIS, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, “private sector” meant everybody except governments and intergovernmental entities. Since that time, you know, the ideal of multistakeholder and the making a distinction about calling out civil society and commercial has evolved, but at the time we founded ICANN, that was an umbrella term.
Sébastien: Thank you. Any questions? Thoughts?
Cheryl: Schombe?
Schombe: Merci beaucoup. pause
Interpreter: Thank you very much for this consultation. I have a major preoccupation vis-à-vis all the measures we have undertaken to satisfy At-Large, our country, and in the South 42.40. My name is Schombe Baudouin, I come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and I’m an ALS.
There are two points. There’s a second point which is very important, and the sixth one, which you just raised and which is related because if you have to come to an internization 43.02 of ICANN, you need these two.
There’s one thing where we have been meeting a lot of problems and that is ICANN does exist and it is known, but it’s known at a certain level, because even at the level of inaudible 43.18 we have problems with political deciders who do not want ICANN. We’ve distributed inaudible pamphlets and material and we’ve had meetings, but up to this very day, ICANN is not well known. This so much so among the political deciders and now with the associative movements which use numeric 43.44 technology, or digital… digital or… for needs which are not well known and who do not understand the mechanism which has been set up and what we can use regarding the future of ICANN.
There’s another problem which we do not understand and that is between internet and our institutions like the UN which are working projects of digital programs, who do not have the same approach as ICANN and what ICANN has been doing. We’ve had problems with the UN and when we have tried to set up 44.22.
So this has raised a lot of problems. So the question is a very important one. How are we today… are we going to solve these problems? We’ll be able to develop projects on… and problems related to security. These are problems of internet security which has become a serious problem, so I think that we have to rethink a little bit of this mechanism. It has become a recurrent matter for us, so we must be able to find some link between the three points, and particularly the sixth point which was raised, which links to the second one, to be able to link to the third one. Thank you very much.
Cheryl: Thank you. I’ll just take the mic back for a moment. Do you wish this to just be a listening exercise here or did you wish to make any intervention?
Yrjö: Well, I think we’ll mostly listen but of course if you…
Cheryl: Please, microphone.
Yrjö: Yeah, sorry. Yeah. I think that we mostly came here to listen, but of course if we can provide any answers if you have questions that we can answer, so we…
Cheryl: Evan?
Marylin: Before you do that, I think this was a fascinating linkage of the three. So you’re going to be the first speaker on Thursday at the public forum, right?
Cheryl: laughter Yes, we’ll get that organized.
Marylin: Alright.
Cheryl: Evan.
Evan: Hi. I hope this won’t be a listening thing because I have a question, and that question is about the gap that I see that is fairly big between your perception of the word “public” and mine or at least that or most of the people I know. When I take a look at the organizations that contributed, those 22 organizations, you have AT&T, we have the Council for International Business, we have the IP Law Association. When I think of the term “public” I don’t think of those groups. Meanwhile, here we are, you’ve been all over the world trying to solicit things, and yet there’s only one person in this room right now that’s actually made a contribution to your document and he’s talking to you. And find myself actually embarrassed in that situation. And I’ll like to know, as here we are as the group that supposedly… At-Large, almost the definition of the public presence within ICANN, why there has been so little involvement of us not only in answering the questions but even in the constitution of the questions?
Cheryl: Here goes. 46.58
Marylin: You know, thank you, and you too are going to have to speak at the microphone on Thursday, but I’m going to try and answer anyway.
Cheryl: laughter Taking a list.
Marylin: I’m taking a list. You know, I think that’s both a very fair statement and actually mirrors a good part of the discussion that has taken place within the PSC, but I want to correct a perception. We haven’t actually been all over the world and that I think is one of the problems, Evan. We took advantage of existing meetings in order to create some visibility because people did not use the public comment process. It is of real concern to me that there were 22 comments to the PSC and there were almost 200 comments to the Department of Commerce JPA, and many of them were from your community, if I could use that term broadly. So the interesting thing to me is that, you know, it somehow was easier for people to get agreement or approval to submit comments to a governmental consultation, but they didn’t… they have not yet – I want to make that point – they have not yet provided comments to us.
And so it would be helpful to understand why. If it’s because our documents are impenetrable, which could be, or that what we’re asking you to do is devise a solution as opposed to comment on ideas you’re being given…
I will just say one thing about the use of the term “public.” I think “public” means different things to different people. If you’re an elected official in many countries, “public” is everybody, not just civil society or NGOs. But I think your point was that the people who are in the unique status of being affiliated with the At-Large have not actively participated – is that right?
Evan: I think it’s a combination that thing as well as others. I mean, there have been a number of publics who have been involved and who have been actively solicited by your committee. And I don’t think that ALAC has been part of that. I mean, the fact that there are so many groups that would go right to the JPA… right to the DoC as opposed to your committee, I mean, if you’re talking about gauges of institutional confidence, maybe that’s telling right unto itself.
Marylin: We are joined, I see, by our third colleague on the ALAC. Pierre, do you want to introduce…
Pierre: inaudible 49.51
Marylin: Yes. Do you want to introduce yourself? And you might have a comment to that.
Pierre: Okay. Thanks so much. Pierre, and I’m sorry. I was in the middle of a meeting and then I pop in here and I also have to go back there. But of course, as far as I’m concerned, I think I’m at home inaudible 50.07 ALAC and maybe briefly on the consultations on the IIC.
Thanks so much for those who provided, you know, some sort of questions and eventually contributions. But it’s also a process which is ongoing, actually, and of course I’m not going into details. What I think… What is set up there for the PSC is a series of consultations so that we reach some sort of consensus and especially in this transition, you know 50.40, planning. So I think… The only one thing I have to say is that okay, we really would like to be having these sort of… your contributions, you know, and questions, especially on what we want to do once this GP ends sometimes in September 2009 – you know, these are the issues actually. So inaudible 51.01 again and sorry, because there’s so many meetings, and yeah.
Cheryl: Thank you. We understand and we really appreciate you squeezing us into your busy schedule. I’ve reshuffled the speaking order because Alan needs to leave. I now have an order of Alan, Izumi, Adam, Sébastien, and Carlos. And now Vanda – and I think I’ll close it at that.
Go ahead.
Alan: I have just one point to make. I was intrigued as I went through the document the first time that term “transparency” does not get used in the section on accountability but does get used about 12 times in the section of capture. And there seems to be a focus at the micro level, on the capture level of making sure that a single person can’t vote on two organizations or… and several times it talks about transparency in selecting the members of the various organizations. And yet the section on accountability focuses on the legalistic issues and formal dispute mechanisms and recall but never that ICANN itself is the organization which now consists of I don’t know how many employees and people making rules and making decisions, and not one mention on transparency in that one, which I think is absolutely crucial, that anyone involved in ICANN can believe in their heart that it is an open organization and isn’t trying to play games at some level. And I just was rather surprised it hadn’t come up somewhere.
Marylin: You know, I think that’s helpful, but I’m going to say… I’m going to ask you all a question. So one of the things that has been talked about is publishing to the community all of the staff reports that are given to the Board so that the… And obviously any confidential information or, you know, the kinds of information that is about personnel, etc., would not be published, but there has been discussion about what are the kinds of additional things that should be made available, and that I think fits into the issue of transparency, Alan…
Alan: That ce-… That’s…
Marylin: Yeah. Umm… Yeah. Maybe one of the things that we should, you know, both hear here but also hear more about is what else are you…
The other thing we’ve heard is that publishing volumes of information all at one time, all at the last minute may be very transparent, but non-digestible.
laughter
Marylin: laughter So, you know, transparency is important, but meaningful digest of the information may actually facilitate understanding and the ability to then understand the information.
A lot of the discussion though that has gone on in the PSC has been the following: You can be a very transparent organization, and if you have no mechanism to change a decision, you have transparency without meaning. And so that’s perhaps why we seem to be focussed on accountability mechanisms. At the Washington meeting, in the transcript there’s a very, very interesting intervention by Becky Burr – and perhaps Nick might pull up that section of the transcript for you later. Becky raised a very strong challenge about the ineffectiveness of the existing three mechanisms for accountability and suggested that it’s not good enough to put out two new kinds of accountability mechanisms, but that we need to go back and fix the first three so that you have a hierarchical series of accountability mechanisms that are very accessible. And I think that was… Could you?
Yrjö: Yeah, I think that they have… Now when you say it, it’s clearly an omission that we didn’t talk about transparency because transparency and accountability, they have been really like always mentioned at the same time. However I think that we, without of course thinking that everything has been ordered and done in the area of transparency, there have been some improvements in that area lately and we really were mostly worried about accountability, where such improvements have not been made.
Cheryl: Thank you. Izumi, you are next, but I do see that the time is in fact 5 o’clock and I do want to ask are you available for another few minutes if we were to extend it?
Yrjö: Sure. Yeah.
Cheryl: So you’re happy for perhaps 10 more minutes?
Yrjö: Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Cheryl: Okay. Is the meeting happy to extend this conversation for another 10 minutes? Excellent.
Izumi, go ahead.
Izumi: Thank you very much. My name is Izumi Aizu and I’m from APRALO/ALAC.
I really welcome the attempt for the… your committee to have this interaction with us. While in the context that ALAC is under review and also we are going to debate the role of individual users and non-commercial organizations at the GNSO improvements structure – it’s the right moment I think.
However, by reading two documents, I haven’t really been able to find the term “At-Large” or “ALAC,” or “individual users.” There are terms of “individuals.” A few years ago when you guys started, we – ALAC – made a special plea to send or somehow get involved in your committee, which originally was not the case inaudible 57.14, you went there, not because we want to be exposed to, but more have a meaningful sort of thinking and intelligence together to be put into the strategy and directions of ICANN.
So… But don’t take it as a criticism but more of a suggestion that it might be more productive if you could extend the definition of the multistakeholder, which are mentioned several times, but it doesn’t really provide your definition or all understandings there can be. When ICANN started, they said it’s a stakeholder-based organization, but there are different interpretations of how the stakeholders are organized or represented – being advisory, being on the Board, and stuff like that. And how do you define? Is it individual users per individual, or collective groups? What’s the difference between civil society and the individual users? All are valid questions and it’s worse to further deepen that. And that could be partially our fault, that we didn’t really give you enough input. But also it’s sort of mutual, that, by the fact that haven’t really mentioned these, felt like “Oh, we are not really part of your subject. You’re more talking about the governmental or in a political strategic 58.34 thing” – high-level, and we are usually in the bottom so we may not be sort of, you know… And I’m sure that’s wrong, but I’d like to really see these to be discussed further in detail.
Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Izumi. Adam.
Adam: Hello. In a similar sort of vein, and I apologize for not sending comments. I started to write them and then they went on and on and on and never got finished, which I think is quite common.
Similar vein, what I mean, was going to say was when I read the documents, I wondered how much sort of cross-ICANN joined-up policymaking was going on in your thinking and the way you’re addressing this because there is the ALAC Review going on, there is the GNSO Review going on, which is relevant, and there is the NomCom Review going on, which is also extremely relevant. And some of the things, if we look to accountability – and I’m thinking perhaps of a different thought of “accountability” – the Nominating Committee Review made some recommendations which I think have been largely rejected, but they were suggesting that the Board might split into a sort of functional Board and then an oversight Board – one that kept an eye on another, which is German model of, what do you call it, corporate governance.
And those type of things people have spoken about. Well, who will hold… Once the JPA is gone, who will hold ICANN accountable? ICANN itself or its internal structures? That seems to me to be somewhat… well, it’s a circular thing and isn’t really accountability in terms… Some kind of external structure may be desired, and I haven’t really seen great mention of that, but there’s elements there that I’d like to see considered and I think should be considered. So that’s one thing on accountability.
Thinking about issues of capture, one of the things I thought… I made a very bad intervention in Paris and gave up after losing my English, and what I wanted to say is that volunteerism, I think, is inherently open to capture, and I think Marylin, you and I are perhaps good example of this. We’ve been around in this for a long time. Is our contribution, because we’re willing to volunteer, an element of capture? I did four years of Nominating Committee which meant everybody who was appointed by the Nominating Committee had a bit of my opinion in them – that’s a terrible form of capture in that one person has had an influence on every person in the leadership position appointed by the NomCom. And your influence, Marylin, because you volunteer is extremely strong within this organization. Do we consider this as a… From the history of the organization. I mean this with the greatest respect. I’m, you know… Is that a form a capture, and is that inherent to the volunteer system that we’re actually developing and working with? You know, it’s a sort of interesting thing I think to think about, because it applies to other things as well – the IGF and other multistakeholder processes we’re trying to develop.
On multistakeholderism, I noted that the old PSC document began with a request to improve business participation. I was disappointed that the other part of that civil society, or users or non-profit wasn’t equally seen… or seen to be equally important, or at least there’s an indication that it wasn’t seen to be equally important because it wasn’t mentioned in the same way and with the same weight. If we’re going to be a multistakeholder organization then perhaps we should look at the WSIS and those definitions of multistakeholderism and try and say, “Does ICANN hold up well against that?” I’d suggest at the moment that it perhaps doesn’t. And I’ve spoken enough.
Cheryl: laughter You’re becoming psychic.
Yrjö: 19
Cheryl: Very short. Yes, please. Go ahead.
Yrjö: Just that… Thank you very much. I mean, we haven’t really taken a close look at the reviews and the material they could give, and I think that we have to do it. So much work is actually being done in various places and it’s very difficult follow. Voluntarism, to my mind it’s not capture because if we say that it is, then we have to rewrite a lot of political history in the world. And last but not least, these business people, they were mentioned in relation to… in answer to very specific complaints, and of course the other stakeholders would have been there also.
Cheryl: I have Carlos, I have Vanda, and because I’m feeling extraordinarily generous, I now have Beau. That really is the end of the line. Go ahead.
Carlos: 11
Interpreter: …simple question, sir. And an easy question. I think that under 24, you’re trying to reassure yourself of operational security and financial security. As I teach economics at the university, I’m talking of talking about traditional economy and traditional economy. Faced with the current crisis of traditional economy, I wish to know if you have taken any measure or taken any steps, and if this crisis can be… will be transferred to this new economy, the economy of reason, and 11 classical economy… are afraid and do not invest in the development in the measures of ICANN. I don’t want to reach the level of transparency. Now what are the measures of which you are referring to and which are the steps that you want to take? And thank you.
Marylin: So thank you. Let me clarify that we actually won’t be taking the steps, we will be proposing that ICANN take steps and asking you to comment on whether those steps are adequate. So one of the discussions we have had is all of you know that ICANN is facing… and I describe it as an operational tsunami of work, in relation to dealing at the same time with the introduction of major new numbers of gTLDs, introducing IDNs, and trying to play their role of supporting the awareness of the importance of the transition to IPv6.
They also have on their plate another very important issue that has emerged in the last several weeks. Some of you will have seen the announcement about the cache poisoning, the Kaminsky flaw, which raises and elevates the question about DNSSEC.
So we have an organization that has a huge amount of responsibility for sort of making sure that certain operational functions happen on an ongoing basis and are stable, right? Because the internet depends on certain stable, reliable, predictable functioning. Now ICANN does not run the internet nor do the registries and registrars run the internet. The internet is built and is run by ISPs, but the unique indicators that ICANN allocates and manages are critical to the online world. So its function has to be stable, predictable, reliable, fair, transparent.
As it… And that happen in spite of the economic downturn and it has to happen in spi-… So if… And I’ll just, you know, say hypothetically, so a hundred people want to run a new gTLD, but if the issue is that ICANN’s operational functioning is destabilized and it can’t perform the rest of its functions, then ICANN as a community has to make priority decisions in order to deal with that.
So we were trying to get at the idea that there have to be safeguards, so to speak, or, you know, the ability to be predictable. We also have talked about the fact that ICANN should have a significant reserve fund. It may be a year is not enough. You know, the point is… Let’s say that something absolutely unforeseen happens and people stop buying domain names, and ICANN’s funding is based on the collection of fees – well, it certainly would take us more than a year to figure what our next funding model was and we would have to run the organization while that happened.
So that’s kind of the thinking and the dialogue. You know, I would welcome hearing more from you guys – we’re going to be around afterward – about whether you think we’re, you know, touching on the right issues, but that’s kind of the priority we’re trying to give to that.
Cheryl: I have closed the list, Izumi. Sorry. We are now three minutes over our extension. If you are both concise, I will beg the indulgence of the committee members for another five minutes, if that’s suitable. Yes, it is. Please go ahead, Vanda, and then Beau.
Vanda: Yeah. Thank you, Marylin. I have the opportunity to watch the Washington in the web – it was very good. And we have a bunch of people together, it’s very good.
Marylin: Great.
Vanda: And, well, one question you 36 answered, but the other is not a question but a concern about the multistakeholder. I believe that multistakeholder is the most important gift from the ICANN to the history. And I believe that is not in fact really working right now and we need to guarantee that the model start to working better and continues to work to allow the other communities around the world to take this model. And in my point of view, we need to enforce a little bit the conditions the ICANN is running now the multistakeholder, because some issues are concerning me. First one is the participation of users is not well, you know, recognized or whatever word you want to use.
Cheryl: There’s plenty of other words.
Vanda: laughter Yeah. But in the other way, I’m 07 participation and something about govern being paid to participate, and I’m a little worried about that, you know, because once you have some of those dependents and in this kind of participation, you change completely the model. It’s… In an other way, it’s ICANN capturing the governs. So it’s something… laughter
Cheryl: That works.
Marylin?: 45
Vanda: Finally. Finally, Finally. Finally. But anyway, it’s not the pure multistakeholder working. So that’s some points that I’d like to have you in mind to talk about.
Cheryl: I now have a dream. Beau, do you wish to speak first? Or would you like to respond to that then now, or…?
Beau?: 14
Cheryl: Okay. If you would hold for just one moment. Please, go ahead, Pierre.
Pierre: Sorry. I just wanted to come back to this stakeholder, you know, thing, and thank you very much for bringing this up again, and to totally agree Izumi in fact in what was he referring to. And also I think at the beginning of the discussion of this PSC, that came, you know, high on the agenda, on the multistakeholder approach. And at some point or so you need to really face some of the issues that were there. For instance, when we were discussing, you know, the JPA, most of the comments also that were coming, it was about the business sector, then I think we spent time in even defining that one exactly.
The other issues is about, you know, okay, At-Large and the individual users. How do you really figure them in the whole thing? But I think that’s where my recommendation 13 is not just to put the questions. I think we also need some suggestions, a few suggestions on what we are really meaning about, you know… And then for me, it reminds me, you know, a few years back when were defining “At-Large,” who is At-Large? Who is civil society? Those things are there.
And the last thing is, okay, the comments we are receives 35. Why you guys not are not mentioning GAC? Or the governments? I mean, these are some of the things we are receiving so we say, “Fine. It can be a multistakeholder thing, model, but let’s define what we are really meaning by ‘multistakeholder’ and let’s see exactly…” When we mean individual users, how do we recognize, you know, its contribution to the whole thing? It’s not so simple.
So I’m just, you know, pleading that we collectively try to provide, you know, much more sensible definitions of those so that 11 into whatever document we are producing. Alright, so…
Cheryl: Thank you, and thank you so much for your time. I realize you need to leave. Beau, please go ahead.
Beau: Yeah. I’ll be quick because my comment echoes what you’ve been hearing over and over again, and in fact echoes what I wrote and my organization said during the whole JPA phase, which is this issue of stakeholders yet again. If you look at, you know, point 2 there where it says, “To strengthen ICANN’s accountability to its community” and you read in there, you don’t see the word “user” mentioned, you don’t see the word, you know, “regular human being” mentioned.
laughter
Beau: You say, you know, “accountable to the GAC” – the GAC is an organization that holds every meeting behind locked doors. So, you know, if you want to get more feedback the community of users, you’ve got to make it less obvious that you’re not listening.
Marylin: I do want to respond to that. We had a big discussion at the beginning. We had a big discussion at the beginning about whether we should be reaching into the review processes and sort of data mining them – pardon me for using that word – and taking into account what they were doing. And, you know, to some extent, I think we may… I’m listening to you and thinking, “Maybe we have taken some things for granted,” and that is that some of this other work about defining “multistakeholder” was going to be going on anyway. And we have tried to be pretty narrow about what we’re doing. Now what I’m hearing you say is “You got to get this definition agreed to by the community, got to articulate it, make sure it’s balanced, get it agreed to by the community in order to complete the rest of your assumptions and your work” – that’s kind of one thing I’m hearing, okay?
The other thing I’m saying, I’m telling is yes, you’re right. We have been responsive. As Pierre, we have been responsive to the people who rang us up, so to speak, by sending us a contribution and saying, “You ignored this, you ignored this, you ignored this.” You have now drawn to our attention that just because we didn’t hear from you doesn’t mean there’s not a lot on your mind, right? But I have a question for you, and I don’t mean today. I have a question for you. I think you have to tell us the present approach to public comment does not seem to be working. And I would say that myself because I can add 22 plus 14 – can’t go much beyond that – but that’s not a good number. That total’s not a good number.
So, you know, I think a question I’m going to ask on Thursday is, you know, do we need to have more… is the effective way to do this face-to-face? And if that’s the case, what’s the timing and, you know, how does it fit with your ability – “your” meaning community-wide – ability to participate? I don’t have an answer. You’ve given me a question.
Cheryl: It has been pointed out, and it is with great embarrassment and even more apology, that I skipped over one of my vice chairs. Sébastien, you have the honour of the last word other than my thanks to the committee.
Sébastien: Okay. Sorry. Yeah, I think what is interesting is that when we set up this session, we were a little bit afraid that it will be without no exchange, it will be difficult. And I see that we can spend hours, days even…
laughter
Yrjö?: We have no time! laughter
Sébastien: And we will have to fix that and to see how it’s possible. I just want to some small sentence, it will be rough, but the question of accountability. As I said in Geneva and as other people say, the knowledge, the people who know, the experts are the first ones who could capture. And in that respect, we need as At-Large organization your help for our summit because our goal in that summit, it’s to allow more people, more organization, and more countries to have experts, expertise and to become experts. More you have experts, less you have the possibility to capture. And it’s not just because it’s the 10th anniversary of ICANN, it’s not just because we set up ALAC and the five RALOs, it’s also a question of non-capturing the organization. And we need to work together on that issue.
Just a second word – I have many – but internationalization, I say it will be rough and it is. It’s not because you replace an US citizen to an Australian or New Zealander citizen, then you are internationalizing the organization. And I love all of them, no problem…
Cheryl: 05
Sébastien: …and I am very happy that we have Cheryl as chair of the ALAC once again…
laughter
Sébastien: …I want to say that again. But we really need to find other ways… And it’s not just a question of translating the documents, hundreds of pages. As I say very often and I will say once again, I prefer to have a business summary written in an international English that could be translated in other languages, but before it must be written in an English understandable by…
Marylin: Anyone.
Sébastien: …a lot of people.
Marylin: Yeah.
Sébastien: Most people. Like that we will make better. We don’t need hundred pages to be translated because we have no time to read it. And if one of us want to read it, then it’s another question, but generally speaking, we don’t need these hundred pages. But a good summary and a translation of the good summary will be better and we will put better the money in that type of work than translations of 12 paper.
Sorry. I have no time to say something else. I just want to thank you very much for this exchange and thank you for coming to us, because I think it was and it is a very important discussion we have to have together. Thank you very much.
Interpreter?: Microphone please, Madame. Microphone.
laughter
40 to 1.21.00
Cheryl: I trust you all have come out of that three-quarters of an hour believing – oh, thank you so much – believing that that was a very worthwhile exercise and that we are now better prepared to engage properly in the public workshop on Thursday. Which brings me to the point of our expectations, of course, is for us to engage intelligently at the public workshop on Thursday. It’s not a criteria that every single one of us line up and say the same thing. It would be a criteria if we can have a very similar exchange to what we had today, and there is no harm in repeating concisely much of what has been said.
Yes, Evan, go ahead.
Evan: My question, I guess, would be why leave it at that? Why leave it to specific questions launched in a specific thing? Mohamed just asked a question that I think is worth raising and I think is worth ALAC’s consideration, and this is creation of a liaison with this committee. I mean, one of the things that’s bothered me is that their definition of their… their definition of multistakeholder, their definition of the community just seems so out of synch with anything that we are dealing with. I would like to allow them… I would like to get them to agree on at least either having a liaison with us or some kind of mechanism that would allow us to shall we say inflict our…
Cheryl: Evan, I’m sorry. I’m just 45 because you’re not able to read what’s happening as well. Pierre who was here is the ALAC liaison to that committee. We have no ability to change him because it is… nor would I want to. It isn’t coming up for election or review, but that is the ALAC person on the committee – before my day – and it is at the President’s wish that they come or go. So if he for some reason was not able to continue, then the ALAC would be asked to replace them.
Evan: Well, then can I suggest that the ALAC may want to take the initiative and say that the relationship right now absolutely bites and that we ought to do something about it?
laughter
Evan: No, actually without using that language, I’m serious that there has to be some kind of assertion made that the relationship between the committee and the At-Large community is below substandard, and I don’t care if they replace an individual, they don’t replace an individual, but something needs to be done about this. Is this not worth something to address at something more than just a public comment?
Cheryl: I… I’m not struggling because I don’t have much to say, it’s that I have said much in the past and I have been given certain answers. I would caution against this being something to be raised at the public forum, but I totally endorse the fact that I will make mileage wherever possible – not necessarily in a public forum – of the fact that that is the first time I have ever set eyes on the ALAC liaison to the PSC.
Go ahead, Sébastien.
Sébastien: Yeah. First of all, about words – he’s not our liaison. He was speaking as a member of the PSC with the proposal of the ALAC at that moment, but he’s not a liaison, and that’s maybe one part of the difficulty of the situation. And I just want to urge you to discuss with him, of course, but discuss with the other members. Marylin Cade, I know her since the beginning I was participating at the ICANN meeting. She came from the business constituency. I was participating to the business constituency too – it’s one big illness, but sometimes we recover. But she’s very aware of what is happening also in the At-Large area and she’s very open. I can say that for Jean-Jacques Subrenat who is Board member from France elected by the NomCom last year, and so on and so forth. Then we may interact with those people.
The goal really today of this part of the meeting was to open this discussion and to allow as much as possible people to be aware of the subject and to participate. And we… I don’t think it’s 59 working. It’s like that. The question of the multistakeholderism, I wanted to say – and it seemed when I was outside that you say something the reverse – but I really prefer the multistakeholderism within ICANN than the one within IGF, and ICANN really discussed with you on that for some time because ICANN was the first one to set up this type of diversity and it’s better done than it was and it is done in… with this in the IGF process. I am really ready to work on that topic. I think we need to find some words to say during this weekend and after about this consultation and those consultations, and I would be happy to work on that. Thank you.
Cheryl: Izumi, but I would also note the clarification that is going on the wiki with us using the term “liaison.” I responded and did not delete that word from response. It is my error for having done that. And also, Fatimata, I think it is important to know we do not have a problem or even a perception of a problem, we have a situation where somebody has been appointed and that appointment is a finite and defined thing. It was at the request of the ALAC that that was done and Izumi and Hong were here at that time and they’re probably best equipped to explain that and I’d like to offer them the opportunity to do that. There is no perception that there is a problem, but there is no connection back to us. It was very heartening for me to hear that he said he feels at home here, this is where… you know, this is the ALAC.
Izumi, and then I will ask you Hong to contribute as well. And then Vanda. Go ahead, Izumi.
Izumi: The first thing is that, the one I wanted to talk to them, but because I was late to, but I think it’s still worth to share with my colleagues, is a point not related to the liaison or not. What I felt missing from the current version of the two documents from PSC might be perhaps the need to explore the relationship with other organizations which relates to but not directly under the purview of ICANN. For example, the case for IPv6, or v4/v6 and an interesting thing that ICANN alone cannot solve. We know that at some point that v4 will be gone out. I had a very interesting and difficult discussion earlier this year with some of the Board members that “No, no, no, the 52 is not under our mandate. So we can only deal with how to assign the addresses, but how to operate that is beyond our scope.” And I asked who’s taking care of. “Well, not us. Not IETF, not…” Ooh. You know? But it’s a mutual problem. And like what if the domain names aren’t gone or people are not going to use it, then can ICANN per se solve that? I don’t think so.
There are many other areas and ICANN was quite often criticized that we are in a very narrow silo and not really interact. But I understand still that well, that’s our technical mission or, you know, our given thing. But if it is for this strategic thing, then we may be able to go beyond that given mandate of today and go, you know, out of the box. So again, it’s not a criticism, but ALAC itself also can really explore that.
For the liaison thing, I think that we may have some different understandings of the role of Pierre at the PSC. Even though we strongly advocated to have sort of a member from us or somebody from us, it didn’t mean that he will act neither our representative nor liaison. After you’re selected to the Board, likewise you act for the entire sort of benefit of, not the constituency. So that we need to engage with him or we need to go forward and see it works or not before discussing about removing or things like that.
Cheryl: 30 Please, let me clarify for the record. No discussion of removal. What I was saying is it is at the President’s pleasure that these people serve on his committee. Therefore the only indicator for any change would be an inability to continue.
Izumi: Yeah. And Pierre and Marylin said that we better give substantive suggestions or areas that we’d like to see them to take it on.
Cheryl: Hong, if you would like to?
Hong: Oh. Okay, thanks. With respect to this liaison issue, I will follow what Izumi-san said just now. It happened in 2006, perhaps at Marrakech meeting. ALAC recommended Pierre to be a member of PSC and he was appointed indeed by the President. So he’s a member, he’s never been a liaison for ALAC to PSC.
I’ve another point that I also want to deliver to them, but they left. Can I say it now? Oh, okay. Right. It’s about point 3, internationalization of ICANN. It seems that ICANN emphasizes those physical or administrative internationalizations such as setting regional offices or organizing regional meetings. But what is interesting is that when they’re doing this, they did very little consultation in that region. Especially recently, they have a new office in India, South Asia, but people in Asia never heard about this office and we still don’t know whether this office is providing any support for East Asia. laughter And they have some…
Female?: 20
Hong: You don’t know that? Oh, I talked with Mr. Twomey in Beijing, so that’s very true. Your President confirmed that. laughter
Nick: 30 staff even knows that.
Hong: Oh, well, that is very surprising. In New Delhi.
Vanda: It’s GAC Secretariat.
Hong: Oh, it’s a Secretariat, not an office? pause Okay. Oh, I’m sorry for that.
And for the regional meetings, I think this is even more problematic. They organized a regional meeting in Taipei for Asia Pacific region, but neither Izumi nor I heard about this meeting. We were not invited. We were not able to attend, even though there was a regional meeting in Asia… Okay.
Cheryl: Very valid points. laughter Very valid points. Vanda and then Evan.
Vanda: Just to add some issue here. When Paul appoints someone, it’s by himself to appoint. That’s the mandate. But what I know, that he just consults people from the region or the community they belong to. So that is the point. The point is not the liaison, it’s not the recommend, but it’s listen, “What do you suggest?” as 56 time inaudible.
The other point I’d like to raise, it’s about the model for international ICANN. We had a lot of discussion in the past about… inside the Board included, how to use the model, because it’s a quite new organization. There is no model around, so how we move from this non-profit organization set up in some place in response to the DoC, to an international really organization wherever they are centred, there is no point. But how is the model? How can this be really recognized by the nations, by the community? There is an international organization? That is the main point for the future of ICANN in my opinion, and this is dependent on the multistakeholder works very well. They have all the governs agree with the model. So there is a lot of the community accepted that is something that represents them, so there is a lot of things to debate that is under some points but not connected in this… I send some message during the Washington, I was attending, but anyway, the idea is to have more connected in all those questions because in the end, the whole questions needs to appoint to one direction – what is the new ICANN in the future?
Cheryl: Thank you, Vanda. And I think it’s a future that we’d like to see ourselves involved with.
Evan, go ahead.
Evan: Is there some kind of specific action that we want to take as a group to make clear to the committee that the relationship has been nonexistent, that there is a channel that we would like to open, and that we would like to figure out a way to do it? I mean, supposedly we have people that are trying to look after the various communities. As you know, as I mentioned, I did make a submission to the committee. I have received zero response from them since. So in terms of their interest, even when we do try and participate, it’s basically “Okay. Now go away.”
What would be… So I’m just trying to figure out… Rather than complaining, I’m trying to figure out a constructive way to engage this. So even if, for instance… And I’ll go back to my request before about the idea of putting… of designating a liaison. Even if they do not create a liaison, we perhaps ought to have somebody who is monitoring what they’re doing. When they do an event, that person would then find out about it and then notify the appropriate RALO so we don’t have meetings in offices happening in Asia and Asia Pac does not get told, or having meetings in Washington and NARALO doesn’t get told, etc., etc. Having a person who they don’t nec-… We don’t need them to agree on our choice of liaison if somebody who keeps up with them, keeps contact with them, and keeps informed of and by them, which is what I’m asking. Who they’ve put on their committee, whether or not it was officially to liaise with ALAC or not, clearly they haven’t – we know that as an issue of fact, they have not bothered. Even when we’ve reached out to them by submitting, they haven’t bothered to answer back. So is it reasonable to designate either a person or a group of people to say, “We are going to keep on top of that, we’re going to make sure they’re aware of that even though they may not want to”?
Cheryl: If I could take the opportunity to respond to that, Evan, I think it’s… again, it’s a nomenclature. I don’t want to use the word “liaison” because that has particular entrapments in our current rules of procedure, etc., etc. and 58 elections and all sorts of thing wrapped around. But a watching brief from within our structure absolutely would be an ideal situation. There is a very… What I think is actually a very good open interface of information able to be cherry-picked by whomever takes on that watching brief on the ICANN website now, so it would be I think fairly easy to get a small group within our infrastructure whose role it is to make sure that we are better working with them.
But it doesn’t address the issues of how any work we do is responded to. That’s an almost systemic problem with all sorts of parts of ICANN, including this committee. We certainly can address that in a number of ways, not the least of which is in the review processes that are going on at the moment, and don’t lose sight of the fact that the ALAC mid-point discussion paper on our review said other ACs and SOs need to be working with us, and there’s lots of very important things there.
I see Fatimata. Okay.
The opportunities are actually perfect right now because the PSC is the topic or one of the two major topics that the joint AC and SO meeting is going to be addressing, and that’s going to be public-mic’ed, eh? We want interaction. We want to end up at those sessions saying, “We now recognize the issues that the ALAC have, the issues that the GAC has, the issues that the GNSO issues, the issues that generally people on the floor have.” We then have our own meeting time and activities, and it’s an ideal time to get our little working group up and going, right? On Thursday when we come back to the final joint session, we can give some opinion pieces, we can report, and so it’s a perfect time to do exactly what you suggest.
Fatimata, go ahead, please.
Fatimata: Thank you, Cheryl. I’m just wondering if we cannot have some privileged relationship with Pierre, as he was an ALAC member and he’s now serving… he’s now working with the PSC. Can we ask him to do us some kind of favour so that we can benefit from a better relationship with this committee and be more informed about what’s going on?
Cheryl: Sounds perfect to me. Go ahead, Evan.
Evan: That’s exactly what I’m suggesting – having us designate some people that give him a polite phone call, say, “Hi. We’d like to ensure that there’s an ongoing channel.” Whether it’s him… I mean, he seems to be the obvious person for that, but I mean essentially whether it’s with the chair of the committee or whether it’s him, just making sure that “Yes, we have somebody designated to talk to you, to listen to you, anytime you want to talk to the At-Large, we have… here’s your point of contact,” and just to make the process as easy as possible for them.
Cheryl: Short answers? Yes, let’s do that. And I think again it’s an ideal opportunity because we’ve had our meeting, we can say, “From our discussions on… we believe it will be wonderful if we can have a more free and frank dialogue, and…” Go ahead, Sébastien.
Sébastien: If Pierre came here, it was the middle of his meeting, it’s because I asked him to come and he was willing to come. And when I discussed with him, he’s really willing to discuss with any one of you and if we can set up a meeting where he can come, he will coming and there is no problem for that, and let’s take this opportunity to discuss with him in whichever you want.
Cheryl: So the answer’s yes, let’s do it. Any other points on the PSC?
I was fearful that on Monday’s session when the facilitator has all the chairs of the SOs and ACs up on stage and turns to me and says, “What is the At-Large and RALO and community view on the PSC?” I was going to say, “Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn.” I am absolutely delighted to hear that is not the case. laughter This is I believe a very important issue, and when it was raised at the ALAC meeting, it was raised at the ALAC meeting at one of those horrible times when several other things were time-critical and it was in fact a deliberate decision to say, “We do not have time to make a formal response to this,” and I personally very much regret. I think it was a very sad situation.
So thank you personally for everything you’ve given me, but we need to see you and hear you at the microphones. And believe me, just because I’m on stage supposedly being grilled, it won’t stop me saying, “Evan, you have a point to make. Would you like to come forward to the mic?” laughter “Izumi, would you like to come up and speak?” I really will, and I’m not going to let you get away with it either, 42, you’re going to be coming to the microphone. We need to have public participating. And thank you for that.
Yes, go ahead, Evan.
Evan: But rather than have a couple of statements like that, like I say, I think the first thing is rather than come out with some knee-jerk things this week is to say this is the start of a process, we want to open communications to them, and rather than just have… You know, we’re starting from scratch basically, and so rather than just say, “We have some knee-jerk reactions right now,” let’s set up this dialogue, set up this conduit so that ALAC is better informed and they’re better informed where we’re at.
Cheryl: And what the aim of the joint meetings is, to highlight areas of mutual interest, agreement, or concern, not make the solutions. So that fits in absolutely perfectly.
It leads me to the other part. They’re also going to say what do we all feel about this new gTLD thingy. You know that hundred… two hundred! I keep saying it’s only a hundred. How many pages is this beast that you’ve given me to read?
Vanda: I don’t know. It’s… 45
Cheryl: I was… Because there is a tome under my feet here – I’m using it as a footrest.
laughter
Cheryl: We need to not drill down into details but I can assume there will be a couple hot topics, but please make sure I have captured all of them.
Go ahead, Adam.
Adam: Cost? I think if I remember correctly the ALAC was concerned about the cost being exclusionary of not-for-profit organizations, developing countries, and so on, and while I do think they justify why they’ve done it, they’ve said that this round will be costly and in the future the money we raise from this will be used to allow for, you know, lower cost. It’s still something to try and remember what was said previously and I think cost is probably the first one.
Cheryl: I… Yes, go ahead, Patrick.
Patrick VW: Yes. Well, regarding cost, I much agree with Adam and I would have to add that I’ve seen nowhere in these documents – although I confess I haven’t read them all yet – but I haven’t seen nowhere a real breakdown of the costs. I mean, $185,000 just to fly. Even if you pay the 03 $300 per hour, it still represents a long time. I’ve calculated it, it’s more or less like four months’ work full-time to evaluate one application. That doesn’t seem to make much sense. And especially since at every step you can have additional costs in case of comparative evaluations, if you have to go through 33 process and so on. So I think we’ve been talking about transparency in another context, but it would be helpful if ICANN could really tell us what they are doing with all this money.
Cheryl: And I hope to see you at the microphone saying exactly that. laughter Mohamed and then Sébastien.
Mohamed: Actually, I was going to say the same thing that Patrick already said is an issue. I heard today from one of the ICANN staff that if the applicants are non-profit organizations, there might be a special considerations in terms of costing. And if the applicant’s application has been rejected, there’s also the current discussion they said 26 inaudible. But it’s also, it’s good that we’re at the point that we need to know exactly is it the right costing or not?
Cheryl: Sébastien, and please 38.
Sébastien: Yeah. Cost, it was one important issue, and they want to have costs recovered since the inception of ICANN, and as you heard, they need to have more money to be able to handle crisis and they will not give that for free. And we have to be careful because if one organization sets up a few candidates as a non-profit organization and they are both the next year 1.4911, I just want to take the example of that name, where we are with that, what we do with that. And it’s not just saying that it must be less expensive, but maybe what are the criteria to have different costs and what are the… it’s ta-… For me, it’s a little bit like when a company asks for money to hire new people, and after they get this money they close the factory.
Cheryl: laughter Okay. Yes, please, go ahead, Schombe.
Schombe: 52
Interpreter: I think the cost is very, very important because if this price is not well regulated and that a governmental body is not able to satisfy this criteria, this organization, there will be many users who will blocked and even some communities can be blocked because very often these is done for the benefit of 24 communities. And I think it’s a problem which should be settled and something which we have encountered frequently. It’s a problem that we should try to settle. Thank you.
Cheryl: And again, we will have you back at the microphone on new gTLDs too, won’t we, sir? laughter Okay. Izumi, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Izumi: Thank you. Yes, the cost is seemingly a big challenge. Rather than sort of… Well, I would like to see it’s more incremental, starting with a lower fee to enter. And then especially in relation to that is that to me it seems that even you make an error in the application, it looks like you have to pay everything and you lose that. That’s seemingly unfair and there’s no real, at least on this document, sort of a consultation process if you’re the first time to apply and you tried with your best knowledge but you can’t, then it gives automatic advantage to the incumbents. So the intention of this opening up the new gTLD, while the namespace might be expand, that 39 like registries may not be the case. And if you look at the distribution of the existing registries, then it’s fairly imbalanced in many ways.
So I’d rather like to have more sort of attentive attitude or policy to help guide those new applicants to have sort of a level playing field for the entry. It’s not only the cost issue per se of the amount – even if you have a lot of money, it doesn’t mean that you will get there.
Similarly, I sort of understand to set the high sort of entry barrier so that you will not have to deal with some silly applications of, you know, to thousands. Having said that, if you say like you have to commit $50,000 US, for example, and you will be given back some refund if you fail – for $30,000 whatever – then it might be easier, because it’s more rational to pay more if you are closer to the… if not even the final list. So that kind of more – you know, I don’t know how you call this – incremental approach of some sort, these should be considered or I’d like to propose that.
Cheryl: If I may, and being very aware that we will be finishing at 6 o’clock which is two minutes of time, what I’m hearing is that whilst we still remain supportive as we ever have been of expansion of the namespace, better choice, better opportunities particularly for community and geographic names, and 27 necessary – and we’ve not mentioned them but believe me I will be, IDNs and particularly IDNs in ccTLDs – we remain concerned about some aspects and would like to talk further. Our number one concern is in fact with the cost, and there are a number of layers that we’d like to raise later, expecting you all then to come up and back me up by coming to the microphone and actually saying a few things, but they do include the disadvantage to not-for-profits and analysis, and, and, and… The level playing field I think is a very important thing to also highlight.
The other thing I am shocked to my very core that none of you have given it to me because you’ve actually listed all the ones I said to them when they put us through the rehearsal last night, laughter nobody mentioned morality and public order. And I don’t know about you but I still remain very concerned about the implementation of how that particular one is going to… laughter So we do… We will… I’m going to raise that. It won’t be number one, but I am going to raise that.
Go ahead, Nick.
Nick: I wanted to note that there’s a specific explanatory memorandum in the new gTLD documentation on that exact topic. There is also I would just say to you all, as some of you know this independently, there are no other copies of the complete set of new gTLD documents at this meeting. We had them made for all of you because we knew this was important, and Glen had some made at the same time for the GNSO. So don’t lose those.
laughter
Vanda?: You can… 14
Nick: You will not… You will not find them laying around anywhere else at this meeting.
Evan: But you might find them on eBay.
laughter
Vanda: And sell them.
Nick: We will have… The other language versions of them will not be available probably until the meeting is ended. So unfortunately… That’s why we produced only English versions.
Cheryl: Ah. Ah, there we go. Is there any last words? If… Yes, go ahead, Izumi, very quickly.
Izumi: On the morality thing, may I?
Cheryl: Would you like to take it online…? Oh, very quickly.
Izumi: Because I read it and had some idea. First reaction, I might have been naïve, is it’s better than the original or the previous one with vague definition or vague direction only. It has certainly much stronger component to protect the human rights, free speech, stuff like that.
Having said that, I was a little bit puzzled that they haven’t really displayed the sources of consultation and expertise. They say 20 and stuff like that but none are really cited, and that would add perhaps more value if they can indicate where they went.
A more specific one, only one point, in page 5 they are talking about the incitement to the promotion of discrimination based upon race, colour, gender, stuff like that. I was wonder whether in a real case scenario like the triple-X thing, whether this new proposal 48 inviting drugs or organized criminal activities. While it’s very difficult that it is very grey, these are the really, the sources of our real problems for phishing and all the internet-based criminals, but it’s very difficult to sort of regulate existingly. And this new gTLD may be opening up the new, you know, ways for… and later we might be held responsible, something like that. But I was surprised that none of these specifically mentioned. That should be I think there.
Cheryl: Izumi, I think they’re extraordinarily important points, and again, I will do the lead-in. I will pitch you the morality and public order. I need people lined up… Well, it’s not actually going to be lined up at the microphone. Just raise your hand, it will be a roving mic. I really believe it’s a real opportunity for us to move our points of view forward in a very successful way and for the first time be heard with the intent of seeing exactly how each of the SOs’ and ACs’ community views are developing.
I’d like to thank you all for the enormous efforts that you’ve put in today. I’d like to wish those of you who are dining together tonight, good luck and bon appétit. I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart the translators and all the work they’ve done today, especially… 16
Interpreter: “Interpreters,” Madame.
applause
Cheryl: And does this need to go on the public record? Go ahead, Evan.
Evan: Yes. And please, I beg everyone to have a look at the Google Document regarding the summit session planning that I’m still working on, almost done. So before Wednesday, if you have any input, it’s a Google Document called “Summit Session List.” Skype or e-mail me if you don’t have access to it. I’m looking for contribution.
Cheryl: And we will all be meeting tomorrow in the main hall from opening on. Thank you all.
End of Audio
ALAC/At-Large Policy and Planning OneDay #4 – Cairo ICANN Meeting – Part 3
(Held November 02, 2008)
Legend
Name: First name of member of group
Name L: First name plus first initial of last name if there's more than one person with the same first name.
Name?: If we think we might know who's speaking but aren't 100% sure.
Male: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a male.
Female: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a female.
Name: 52 - 0.31.06 We will identify a foreign language in square brackets with a time code for the beginning and end, so that you can quickly identify those passages. At the top of the transcript, we will advise you of the name(s) of the foreign languages you'll need to search for. For example, some transcripts may contain German, so you'll have to search for “[German” instead of “[French” to find all the passages. The speaker identification is the same convention as all the others. i.e. If we know the speaker's name we'll include it, otherwise we'll put a question mark after it, or if we can't even guess, then Male, Female or SP.
Interpreter. If interpreter actually translates French or German for a participant we will note it as “Interpreter”. It will normally be evident from the dialogue who the interpreter is translating for. If not, we will include a note in square brackets with respect to who they are translating for.
cuts out: Audio cuts out for less than 2 seconds. We may have missed something. We do not put this if it's just natural silence where no-one is speaking. We only put this if we can hear that there was briefly a technical problem with the phone line and/or the recording which resulted in temporary loss of sound.
********************************************************************************************************
List of Participants
Important Note: Please note that this should not be considered to be an "official" list of the attendees. This is just a list of the participants that we were able to identify during the transcription. There may have been others present that didn't speak and some people may have participated that were not on the official list of attendees published on the internet.
Aguirre, Carlos
Aizu, Izumi
Ashton-Hart, Nick (ICANN Staff)
Bachollet, Sébastien
Brendler, Beau
Cade, Marylin (President’s Strategy Committee)
Dandjinou, Pierre (President’s Strategy Committee)
El Bashir, Mohamed
Greenberg, Alan
Langdon-Orr, Cheryl (ALAC Chair)
Länsipuro, Yrjö (President’s Strategy Committee)
Leibovitch, Evan
Ludwig, Wolf
Morris, Jacqueline
Muehlberg, Annette
Peake, Adam
Samuels, Carlton
Scartezini, Vanda
Schombe, Baudouin
Seye Sylla, Fatimata
Vande Walle, Patrick
Xue Hong
********************************************************************************************************
Sébastien: …on what are the main points they discuss or conclude or whatever, and where they want to go from that discussion. I would like to do the three groups before the arrival of the PSC people. And if we need to discuss again, we will say to do that after the PSC people left the room.
Who will be… I will take the reverse order and start by the third group. Who will be the rapporteur of the…
Female: Jacqueline. Jacqueline.
Sébastien: …working group?
Female: You have to report on what we did.
Jacqueline: Yeah. Well, I’m just getting…
Female: Okay. laughter
Sébastien: Okay.
Male: inaudible 00.50
Sébastien: Who will be the rapporteur of the second group, “Participation and accountability of ALAC members and liaisons”? It’s you? Okay.
And who will be the rapporteur of the first group, “Policy advice development process”?
Vanda: I guess we didn’t decide, but I can do.
Sébastien: Who wants to do this?
Female: Vanda.
Sébastien: Okay. I see that Vanda will be candidate for that. Thank you, Vanda.
Then the group number 3’s not ready. May I ask you, Carlton, to start? Is it feasible?
Carlton: inaudible 1.33
Sébastien: Okay, great. Thank you very much. pause The mic is to you. Thank you.
Carlton: Thank you, Sébastien. We… Our group, working group was about participation and accountability. A couple of things: Generally we are resolved that the proposal that was floated about accountability is not fit for purpose. We believe that the situation can be improved if we begin with the original one-page document that speaks to participation and accountability as a starting point, and we expand on that to take into consideration other elements of the committee, such as the RALOs and the liaisons as part of the accountability and participation framework.
The members believe that while we see the necessity of keeping statistics on meeting attendance and so on, we should be careful not equate volume with quality. And therefore we would strongly recommend that the statistics may be used only as a guide, but certainly not as part of any punitive operations. The consensus of group as that, with regard to participation and accountability, the premise is more subjective than objective or quantitative. And we should therefore seek the opportunity to embrace that framework.
In keeping with that, we are recommending specifically that if we amend rule 21 of the previous document and drop the Cairo document, we would get to a better position. We believe that in terms of the intervention in the event that we believe there are problems of participation, the framework as exists now ought to be amended. And the amendment I’m going to ask Izumi to read directly what we’re proposing.
Izumi?
Izumi: Okay. Umm…
sound of microphone feedback
Male: I don’t 04.49 support that.
laughter
Izumi: I finish.
laughter
Izumi: Okay. The one we agree, this is sort of a rough consensus thing so don’t read the details of the wordings, but essentially we’d like to propose a friendly amendment to the 21.10: “In case an ALAC member or a liaison is approaching to fail to meet the requirements” – which was defined before – “the community should attempt to resolve the problem in an appropriate manner. If this community approach does not work, the Chair will contact the person and directly 05.38 and discuss the matter. If these attempts still don’t work, the Chair will consult with RALO or NomCom that selected the person for possible actions. In the extreme case, the Chair in consultation with other ALAC members will privately encourage the member to resign. If this does not happen by 14 days from the communication the Chair formally notified the entity responsible for appointing the member, then the message may be copied to the public ALAC list and ask that the appointment is immediately reconsidered.” We agreed to set the liaison’s criteria, which we haven’t done yet.
So we take a very friendly approach to encourage the improvement of the performance before denying him or her to let decide 06.33 on one criteria thing. That’s sort of the spirit of our agreement.
Carlton: Just to mention that we believe before all this can go in place, we should have a prerequisite. The prerequisite is that we should have job descriptions for the various layers and we should as part of that job description give an expectation of performance, what is required for the position. So those are prerequisites to any of this that we are suggesting here.
I think that’s it. Thank you.
Sébastien: Thank you very much, Carlton and Izumi. I just would like to ask if there are any clarification questions, not on the substance but just clarification. And if not, I would like to suggest that Jacqueline, you do… No, it’s not Jacqueline?
Female: No, inaudible 07.30. Sorry.
Sébastien: I was thinking it was a Latin America show this evening. No, Europe is coming in the… Okay.
laughter
Vanda: Europe always there.
Sébastien: Okay. Sorry, it’s your…
Wolf: No, we are just improving the diplomatic relations between the RALOs in Latin America and Europe, and in intensifying our contacts 07.55, we decided to share our presentation.
I just will do a short summary on what we discussed in our part. We first of all concentrated on some basic questions and clarifications and definitions about outreach and what outreach potentially means. In this context, the question is who are finally the users we are always talking about or we pretend to represent? These are some key questions. We have to be clear when defining “outreach.” Another important point was besides the opportunities for outreach, there are always a lot of expectations – sometimes very high expectations – on what outreach could achieve or not.
Besides this introduction and these clarifications we discussed on some structural requirements which are needed or which are essentials for any outreach activities such as the necessary means or budget allocations to do outreach in the particular regions. There were three main points mentioned in this context, structural requirements. There was a budget committee of ALAC installed about two years ago which tried to assess the means and requirements for the structures, for the working structures of ALAC and the RALOs. There was a suggestion – as a second point – to provide a grant, a kind of grant for outreach activities, and RALOs or ALSes could apply to ICANN for this grant on the basis of specific outreach projects, and if they are approved, the budget would be allocated to those outreach projects. And the third point was there should be a kind of equal opportunities among the different RALOs.
The third point was the opportunities, and Jacqueline will go into some more specific details of opportunities. I will just repeat two main points for such outreach opportunities. One prerequisite should be that outreach needs to be part of regional activities – they can’t be… they can differ from region to region but each RALO has to follow up precisely what’s going on in the particular region, and they need to have all the contacts in their region, and they have to be part of ongoing regional activities.
RALOs should also have the authority to decide on their own priorities. The priorities of RALOs cannot around the globe be all the same. This depends very much on the regional particularities and cultural, language, whatsoever circumstances. And there is a variety of outreach opportunities, and it’s Jacqueline who will now go into this specific details because LACRALO and AFRALO had already some experience in this direction.
Jacqueline: Okay. Some of the things that were considered. Partnering – for example, ARIN and AfriNIC are two organizations that consistently have meetings and they’re very, very good at bringing people. So if we partner with them, then we may be able to access more… do some outreach and access people that we would not r-… or organizations that we would not normally get.
The use of our own networks, our personal business networks, and the main thing is the ability of each of us to deliver. So it would be an idea of having more personal responsibility for the outreach.
We need more information that we can use. Now one of the things that has come up several times is the idea of sharing among the regions. If, for example, one region has a presentation that they’ve created on IDNs and they submit it for everyone to access, other people may be able to translate it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Chinese, whatever language, so that all of us would have access to material to be able to use that. And that’s come up several times but I am pretty sure that Nick can get that done very, very quickly in a wiki format type thing – a repository where we can just all submit documents.
And very importantly, the idea of having small workshops for end users in our native languages. For example, have a very small… have a small workshop in… subregional, not the big, huge regional summit-type things, but subregional workshops where your can get 4-, 5-, 600 people maybe to come in and educate them on specific issues.
And piggybacking on other events. So if anyone is currently going to a conference, we can get them to get to go on the repository, get a presentation, and do that in that event, so we can do it with less… fewer resources.
And that’s pretty much it, the main issues and ideas that we came up with.
Wolf, was there anything I left out? Okay.
Sébastien: Okay. Thank you very much for this new team effort for… pause
Nick: I just wanted to note late breaking amendment to the schedule is a meeting was requested with the President’s Strategy Committee and it was impossible to find a time that worked for this group and that group. But two of the members will come here for a half an hour between 4:30 – which is in 10 minutes – and 5 o’clock to speak about the… to have a dialogue with you about the Improving Institutional Confidence process.
Sébastien: Okay, thank you. The last group.
Annette: Excuse me.
Sébastien: Sorry, okay.
Annette: Concerning this pe-… Oops. Where is Pierre, because I met him, so he’s here. He will attend that meeting too?
Sébastien: I… He’s not available at that time. I told him about the fact that we wanted to have a meeting with the PSC. I didn’t know the schedule completely but I told him that it must 16.43 be this afternoon, and he told me he had a meeting up to 6. But he will definitely join us later to discuss that issue with us and one on another moment at least with the group who will be set up to formalize the ALAC position on that issue. But I sent him a mail as soon as I get the final hour to him, and he is aware now. Or if he read his mail, he is aware. I don’t know in which room he is and I can’t… I was not able to… But if you find him before, he’s welcome, no problem.
Thank you. Now we are to go to the last breakout session working group – that’s “Policy advice development process,” and it’s Vanda. Thank you.
Vanda: Okay. Our job was talking about fast track, so I will do fast track. So we talk about translation issues, but it’s a side issue in this subject, but it’s important to have that discussion.
One thing that we decided is we need to have again the working groups working and to push for this process, because we need to have experts around the globe to advise us in many issues, to accelerate issues 18.31. And this is not a matter of regional expertise because there is a lot of issues there is no interest in some region and it has a huge interest in another region. So the working groups need to be populated by experts, not really only regional division or something like that.
There’s… But in many case, we need to have a fast fast track. The fast track is eight weeks – it’s far from fast. laughter So sometimes we need to have some feedback, to give some feedback in one week, or, I don’t know, in 48 hours. And we need to confine this to the executive committee. What haven’t done in this debate is to define properly when is it convenient to use the fast track, the fast fast track, and the fast fast fast track…
laughter
Vanda: …because we need to put numbers on that, you know? If we need to give some feedback in one week, which will be the best solution? Of course it’s not going through the whole process.
Another issue that came up was that we don’t need to wait to post issues on the website just because we have a process started. So we could post that, it was there, people can have time to read them. And in some time, we, you know, have a flag and say, “Well, now we have one month to finish” or “We have 45 days to finish that.” And the flag will be put on the web after… in some time after the people have the opportunity to read that.
That is some of the problems we raised here, and certainly we need to go deeply on that and put some really process, when and why, and the most important issue, how we’re going to make the working groups around the RALOs, the ALS, to really work and give us advice. That is very, very important for the process itself and to give more complete and more diverse opinions about any issue to ICANN. I guess that’s it.
Sébastien: Thank you, Vanda.
Cheryl: Hong?
Sébastien: Another member of the group want to add something?
Cheryl: Hong?
Vanda: Something?
Cheryl: Hong, you wish to sp-…?
Vanda: Something else?
Hong: I guess Vanda gave a perfect summary of our discussions and covered the most important issues. Just one supplement – that is with respect fast track, to make sure it is really fast. We sort of 22.41 believe it would be helpful to make the executive committee to delegate a working group when making the announcement of a policy documents and just streamline the pers-… cuts out
Sébastien: Okay. Any questions, clarifications?
Okay. Then what I suggest, we have three minutes, and just to come back to what is the schedule for after then. We will have two members of the Presidential Strategy Committee who will come to us, and the goal, it’s really to discuss where they are and we have questions or inputs we want to make. It’s not an official consultation by the PSC itself to the ALAC, it’s more informal discussion. And we think it’s an important topic that ALAC must handle also in the next few days. It’s why I think it’s important to have this exchange with those two people. As I already say, if we are able to have Pierre Dandjinou with us, it will be great. If not, I hope that we will have time to find… to discuss with him in a small group or individual, but it’s important also. And on the wiki, there is a link to the information page. So 24.18 it’s in different languages, you can see there. And I think we need to set up a working group to take care of first draft of answer or participation of the ALAC on that subject.
I would like to know if there are people who participate through any of the regional meetings set up by ICANN on that topic in the last… since the Paris meeting? pause Okay.
Female: inaudible 24.53
Sébastien: The regional meeting on ICC on…
Cheryl: inaudible …on Improving Institutional Confidence.
Vanda: Improving Institutional… Yeah. I just… I don’t know if some of those have an opportunity to follow by the web the presentation. I heard Peter and Paul and all the guys in the web, it was a very good one.
Sébastien: Okay. Why I’m putting that on the table is that first of course we have many things to do but it was… I went to the Geneva meeting and it was a very interesting meeting, and in the same time there are a lot of things on the website, the registration of the conference that you can go and watch, there a lot of documents in different languages and they were doing a meeting in each region – that’s a good improvement for ICANN I think. Then… And do you, any of you participate at the meeting in Paris on that subject?
Hong: Of course I didn’t participate the Paris one, I participated at the Geneva one.
Male: inaudible 26.09
Hong: Alright. That’s not the regional meeting, it’s not in Asia.
Cheryl: If I may, Sébastien, a desired outcome at the end of this small amount of time with the representatives of the PSC committee is that in our joint meeting between… joint meeting with – not between, with – the support organizations and the advisory committees of the ICANN, which is a new experiment which has not being done before, we will be addressing two topics – that is new gTLDs including IDN ccTLDs, and we will be addressing the PSC.
Now we’re not going to be discussing the context and having new deliberations. What we are trying to elicit out of Monday’s meeting is where are the mutual points of agreement, disagreement or concern – not to come up with the solutions but to send a very clear message, if one exists, that says, for example in the matter of new gTLDs, I would assume when someone asks me, “What does the ALAC and the At-Large community have as a concern with this process?” I’ll be saying, “We still are concerned about morality and public order. We still want to talk about that. We still want to talk about…” and then I need to fill in this, this, and this. With the PSC, we need to know from you, do we want to talk about it all? Is there any concern you have? Is there any comment you have? Or are you delightfully happy with the motherhood 28.10 statements it makes? It’s at that level, not a drill-down analysis or, you know, trying to wordsmith things.
So that’s very much what we want to have happen at the end of this half hour, is for us to be able to say, “Really, we don’t have any comment” if that’s the case, or “The comments we would like to make or the points we would like to discuss further or what we will be looking at in the future is…” I think the new gTLDs is going to take the lion’s share of our interest, but we cannot ignore the PSC.
Thank you, Sébastien.
Sébastien: Thank you, Cheryl. Alan.
Alan: Sorry. Just a clarification – are you saying at the end of this coming half hour, we should have come up with the list of things that are our concern to raise in the joint meetings? I thought this was a meeting to discuss things with the reps from the PSC, not to deliberate on our own.
Cheryl: No, it’s not a deliberation exercise at all. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. At the end of a discussion… Look, I’m not going to ask how many of you have read it, how many of you have formed an opinion. There is an opportunity in the next half hour for opinions to be formed and you to, at least if not read it, picked up one or two items along the way. Based with that foundation, we have a small chance of getting a list created. Does that make better sense?
Alan: I think in the very least in the next minute or two, someone should post a URL so each of us could be flipping through it if we haven’t already.
Cheryl: It’s… Okay, I’ll copy it. It’s on the wiki, but I’ll copy it across now.
Male: inaudible 29.55
Cheryl: It’s there.
Sébastien: I put it on the wiki already.
Cheryl: It’s on the wiki, but…
Male: inaudible
Cheryl: That’s alright. I’ll get it across as well.
Sébastien: Okay, inaudible time.
Alan: Luckily the wiki is small enough, that means we can all find it quickly.
Cheryl: Yeah, it’s going to be there in half a moment.
Sébastien: Okay, perfect time.
Cheryl: So…
Sébastien: We are very happy…
Cheryl: Welcome.
Sébastien: We are very happy to have two of the members of the PSC. And I really want to thank them because… on so short notice to be able to come. I want to reiterate that the idea, it’s not to have a consultation in any means but to have an exchange of… to have an exchange of thoughts, of ideas, of… We will ask them where they are and how was the different meetings in each region, and if they have any wishes more precisely on what ALAC could contribute to this work. I will let them introduce themselves, and each one of you want to talk, just introduce quickly yourself also and we will go like that.
It’s translated and some of our members will speak in French or… and in Spanish, but you have the translation tools.
Thank you very much. Who would like to start? Okay. Marylin, thank you.
Marylin: Well, first of all, I’m Marylin Cade, and I want to say what a pleasure it is to have a chance to come and talk to you.
We are here in our individual capacity, which you always hear from the PSC members when they come to speak to you, but let me reiterate it. And I say that because I am then going to say how important I think it is, and I’m sure that Yrjö will agree with me, how important it is that you individually take a look at the PSC documents and think about what your individual comments. And I say that because the PSC consultation is an ICANN-wide consultation. Not all consultations at ICANN are ICANN-wide. Some are about policy and they are therefore, you know, about the GNSO or the ccNSO, but this is one of those consultations that is ICANN-wide and it is in my view the most important significant consultation that we can be engaged in right now, because we are talking about what it’s going to take to meet the expectations of the community to take ICANN forward into the future as the stable, trusted steward of the unique identifiers of the internet.
So I’m not going to say a whole lot more because I’d like to be here to listen, but just to say there are some opportunities for input and opportunities to ask more questions. And maybe we can spend a little time talking about that and about how you feel that you can be supported to be able to participate more effectively as the consultation continues.
Yrjö: Yes, good afternoon. My name is Yrjö Länsipuro. I’m the GAC representative from Finland. And I just want to echo what Marylin said, how happy we are that we can be here with you and listen to you and to answer your questions. I assume that that’s why we are here and not so much to talk because you have all read the documents I hope and we’re really looking forward to your questions and your comments. Thank you.
Marylin: And we have one more person to introduce. Maria, Maria Farrell, who is providing staff support to the PSC and is our go-to person on knowing where documents are and where the process is, and let me enlist her support – if we don’t know the answer, we’ll turn to her.
laughter
Sébastien: Thank you, Marylin. Thank you, Yrjö. And I am sure that she has all the information and all the answers. We can rely on her for the future of ICANN. You wanted to add something, Marylin? Go ahead.
Marylin: cuts out …you’d ask if we’d say a few words about what’s happened to date
Cheryl: Umm-hmm. Please.
Marylin: So let me try that. The President’s Strategy Committee was announced in Wellington at the ICANN meeting, and the purpose of the President’s Strategy Committee is to advise on issues that are strategic to ICANN’s future. So about a year ago when the US Department of Commerce… not quite a year ago now when the US Department of Commerce announced the Notice of Inquiry, which is a terms used by governments very often, a formal inquiry about the feedback from the community about the Joint Project Agreement with ICANN, the President… sorry, the Chairman of the Board of ICANN, Peter Dengate Thrush, tasked the PSC with devising and carrying forward on a public consultation with the community.
So we began that work. There’s a number of documents. They’re very high-level and we have heard a lot of feedback and the course of the feedback about getting down to the nitty gritty and providing more details to people. So, you know, happy to hear more about that.
There are five or six key areas that we are addressing: freedom from capture, accountability… I’m going to have…
Yrjö: Internationalization.
Marylin: Sorry. And they are on the… Yes. But the process has involved publishing the documents, taking comments… We have not received as many comments as we would like to receive – I’ll say more about that in just a minute – but we have done a number of regional outreach meetings, and I am going to describe them as “outreach meetings” because for the most part the meetings we can conducted were held in conjunction with another existing meeting and they fit into the schedule of that additional meeting, and that meant they were limited in time, but it was very important to have them because that gave us geographic reach into interacting with the community around the world to at least begin to get the word out and draw attention to the importance of participation.
We held a three-… So we held a brief meeting at LACNIC, we held a meeting is Christchurch, New Zealand in conjunction with APNIC, we held a meeting in Africa in conjunction with a security workshop, we held a brief meeting in Geneva on the edge of the IGF public consultation, and we held a three-hour public consultation in Washington, DC.
That meeting in Washington, DC was attended by close to 200 people and had a wide diversity of commenters. There is a transcript available on that.
The first round of public consultation elicited 22 responses, written responses, and the last round got 14, I think.
So where we are is we are trying to take the comments we’ve received on those six categories and mull through them and take feedback from the community. So, for instance, let’s take a topic – freedom from capture. And the PSC put out some ideas: “Is this the right approach to… Is this the right definition of ‘capture’?” and “Is this the right action to prevent capture?” The feedback from the community is “Mmm, you guys didn’t get it quite right. You focussed on capture by contracted parties.” And many people in the community said, “We’re very worried about a wide range of other forms of capture. That could be because there’s not broad enough participation. We’re worried about captured from international organizations. We’re…”
So we got a lot of feedback about what we hadn’t addressed. So where we are now is trying to take the input we got and to say, “Okay, we need more activities. We need to think about other things that should be done.” Similar activities on almost all of them. I would say the consistent message we’ve got is the community would like us to do something besides publish the headlines and the subtitles.
laughter
Marylin: They want us to write a few paragraphs, is that fair?
Yrjö: Sure, sure. Yeah. But I think that we’re almost at the end of what we call “analysis phase” now. I mean, we have lots of information and analyzing them, and I think that basically those areas, five areas Marylin mentioned, I think that there is a pretty wide consensus that these are actually the most important topics to worry about. And then we have to go onto the design 40.17, I mean, what to do about those concerns, and then eventually of course implementation if this thing is going forward.
But I would like to say that also I see us today at the intersection of what has been so far a pretty much top-down approach, and what I hope from now on, with these meetings we are going to have in Cairo, we’ll a bottom-up process which is of course absolutely necessary.
Marylin: One other thing. We published five areas. In the course of the consultation, we’ve actually been reminded of the sixth area. And the sixth area is maintaining the commitment to the bottom-up, consensus-based model, private sector-led model that ICANN was founded on. And it was interesting because, as the PSC members, we just thought that was given, but many people in their comments started to… really reinforced the commitment to…
And maybe I should say something. “Private sector”… At the time that ICANN was founded, pre-WSIS, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, “private sector” meant everybody except governments and intergovernmental entities. Since that time, you know, the ideal of multistakeholder and the making a distinction about calling out civil society and commercial has evolved, but at the time we founded ICANN, that was an umbrella term.
Sébastien: Thank you. Any questions? Thoughts?
Cheryl: Schombe?
Schombe: Merci beaucoup. pause
Interpreter: Thank you very much for this consultation. I have a major preoccupation vis-à-vis all the measures we have undertaken to satisfy At-Large, our country, and in the South 42.40. My name is Schombe Baudouin, I come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and I’m an ALS.
There are two points. There’s a second point which is very important, and the sixth one, which you just raised and which is related because if you have to come to an internization 43.02 of ICANN, you need these two.
There’s one thing where we have been meeting a lot of problems and that is ICANN does exist and it is known, but it’s known at a certain level, because even at the level of inaudible 43.18 we have problems with political deciders who do not want ICANN. We’ve distributed inaudible pamphlets and material and we’ve had meetings, but up to this very day, ICANN is not well known. This so much so among the political deciders and now with the associative movements which use numeric 43.44 technology, or digital… digital or… for needs which are not well known and who do not understand the mechanism which has been set up and what we can use regarding the future of ICANN.
There’s another problem which we do not understand and that is between internet and our institutions like the UN which are working projects of digital programs, who do not have the same approach as ICANN and what ICANN has been doing. We’ve had problems with the UN and when we have tried to set up 44.22.
So this has raised a lot of problems. So the question is a very important one. How are we today… are we going to solve these problems? We’ll be able to develop projects on… and problems related to security. These are problems of internet security which has become a serious problem, so I think that we have to rethink a little bit of this mechanism. It has become a recurrent matter for us, so we must be able to find some link between the three points, and particularly the sixth point which was raised, which links to the second one, to be able to link to the third one. Thank you very much.
Cheryl: Thank you. I’ll just take the mic back for a moment. Do you wish this to just be a listening exercise here or did you wish to make any intervention?
Yrjö: Well, I think we’ll mostly listen but of course if you…
Cheryl: Please, microphone.
Yrjö: Yeah, sorry. Yeah. I think that we mostly came here to listen, but of course if we can provide any answers if you have questions that we can answer, so we…
Cheryl: Evan?
Marylin: Before you do that, I think this was a fascinating linkage of the three. So you’re going to be the first speaker on Thursday at the public forum, right?
Cheryl: laughter Yes, we’ll get that organized.
Marylin: Alright.
Cheryl: Evan.
Evan: Hi. I hope this won’t be a listening thing because I have a question, and that question is about the gap that I see that is fairly big between your perception of the word “public” and mine or at least that or most of the people I know. When I take a look at the organizations that contributed, those 22 organizations, you have AT&T, we have the Council for International Business, we have the IP Law Association. When I think of the term “public” I don’t think of those groups. Meanwhile, here we are, you’ve been all over the world trying to solicit things, and yet there’s only one person in this room right now that’s actually made a contribution to your document and he’s talking to you. And find myself actually embarrassed in that situation. And I’ll like to know, as here we are as the group that supposedly… At-Large, almost the definition of the public presence within ICANN, why there has been so little involvement of us not only in answering the questions but even in the constitution of the questions?
Cheryl: Here goes. 46.58
Marylin: You know, thank you, and you too are going to have to speak at the microphone on Thursday, but I’m going to try and answer anyway.
Cheryl: laughter Taking a list.
Marylin: I’m taking a list. You know, I think that’s both a very fair statement and actually mirrors a good part of the discussion that has taken place within the PSC, but I want to correct a perception. We haven’t actually been all over the world and that I think is one of the problems, Evan. We took advantage of existing meetings in order to create some visibility because people did not use the public comment process. It is of real concern to me that there were 22 comments to the PSC and there were almost 200 comments to the Department of Commerce JPA, and many of them were from your community, if I could use that term broadly. So the interesting thing to me is that, you know, it somehow was easier for people to get agreement or approval to submit comments to a governmental consultation, but they didn’t… they have not yet – I want to make that point – they have not yet provided comments to us.
And so it would be helpful to understand why. If it’s because our documents are impenetrable, which could be, or that what we’re asking you to do is devise a solution as opposed to comment on ideas you’re being given…
I will just say one thing about the use of the term “public.” I think “public” means different things to different people. If you’re an elected official in many countries, “public” is everybody, not just civil society or NGOs. But I think your point was that the people who are in the unique status of being affiliated with the At-Large have not actively participated – is that right?
Evan: I think it’s a combination that thing as well as others. I mean, there have been a number of publics who have been involved and who have been actively solicited by your committee. And I don’t think that ALAC has been part of that. I mean, the fact that there are so many groups that would go right to the JPA… right to the DoC as opposed to your committee, I mean, if you’re talking about gauges of institutional confidence, maybe that’s telling right unto itself.
Marylin: We are joined, I see, by our third colleague on the ALAC. Pierre, do you want to introduce…
Pierre: inaudible 49.51
Marylin: Yes. Do you want to introduce yourself? And you might have a comment to that.
Pierre: Okay. Thanks so much. Pierre, and I’m sorry. I was in the middle of a meeting and then I pop in here and I also have to go back there. But of course, as far as I’m concerned, I think I’m at home inaudible 50.07 ALAC and maybe briefly on the consultations on the IIC.
Thanks so much for those who provided, you know, some sort of questions and eventually contributions. But it’s also a process which is ongoing, actually, and of course I’m not going into details. What I think… What is set up there for the PSC is a series of consultations so that we reach some sort of consensus and especially in this transition, you know 50.40, planning. So I think… The only one thing I have to say is that okay, we really would like to be having these sort of… your contributions, you know, and questions, especially on what we want to do once this GP ends sometimes in September 2009 – you know, these are the issues actually. So inaudible 51.01 again and sorry, because there’s so many meetings, and yeah.
Cheryl: Thank you. We understand and we really appreciate you squeezing us into your busy schedule. I’ve reshuffled the speaking order because Alan needs to leave. I now have an order of Alan, Izumi, Adam, Sébastien, and Carlos. And now Vanda – and I think I’ll close it at that.
Go ahead.
Alan: I have just one point to make. I was intrigued as I went through the document the first time that term “transparency” does not get used in the section on accountability but does get used about 12 times in the section of capture. And there seems to be a focus at the micro level, on the capture level of making sure that a single person can’t vote on two organizations or… and several times it talks about transparency in selecting the members of the various organizations. And yet the section on accountability focuses on the legalistic issues and formal dispute mechanisms and recall but never that ICANN itself is the organization which now consists of I don’t know how many employees and people making rules and making decisions, and not one mention on transparency in that one, which I think is absolutely crucial, that anyone involved in ICANN can believe in their heart that it is an open organization and isn’t trying to play games at some level. And I just was rather surprised it hadn’t come up somewhere.
Marylin: You know, I think that’s helpful, but I’m going to say… I’m going to ask you all a question. So one of the things that has been talked about is publishing to the community all of the staff reports that are given to the Board so that the… And obviously any confidential information or, you know, the kinds of information that is about personnel, etc., would not be published, but there has been discussion about what are the kinds of additional things that should be made available, and that I think fits into the issue of transparency, Alan…
Alan: That ce-… That’s…
Marylin: Yeah. Umm… Yeah. Maybe one of the things that we should, you know, both hear here but also hear more about is what else are you…
The other thing we’ve heard is that publishing volumes of information all at one time, all at the last minute may be very transparent, but non-digestible.
laughter
Marylin: laughter So, you know, transparency is important, but meaningful digest of the information may actually facilitate understanding and the ability to then understand the information.
A lot of the discussion though that has gone on in the PSC has been the following: You can be a very transparent organization, and if you have no mechanism to change a decision, you have transparency without meaning. And so that’s perhaps why we seem to be focussed on accountability mechanisms. At the Washington meeting, in the transcript there’s a very, very interesting intervention by Becky Burr – and perhaps Nick might pull up that section of the transcript for you later. Becky raised a very strong challenge about the ineffectiveness of the existing three mechanisms for accountability and suggested that it’s not good enough to put out two new kinds of accountability mechanisms, but that we need to go back and fix the first three so that you have a hierarchical series of accountability mechanisms that are very accessible. And I think that was… Could you?
Yrjö: Yeah, I think that they have… Now when you say it, it’s clearly an omission that we didn’t talk about transparency because transparency and accountability, they have been really like always mentioned at the same time. However I think that we, without of course thinking that everything has been ordered and done in the area of transparency, there have been some improvements in that area lately and we really were mostly worried about accountability, where such improvements have not been made.
Cheryl: Thank you. Izumi, you are next, but I do see that the time is in fact 5 o’clock and I do want to ask are you available for another few minutes if we were to extend it?
Yrjö: Sure. Yeah.
Cheryl: So you’re happy for perhaps 10 more minutes?
Yrjö: Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Cheryl: Okay. Is the meeting happy to extend this conversation for another 10 minutes? Excellent.
Izumi, go ahead.
Izumi: Thank you very much. My name is Izumi Aizu and I’m from APRALO/ALAC.
I really welcome the attempt for the… your committee to have this interaction with us. While in the context that ALAC is under review and also we are going to debate the role of individual users and non-commercial organizations at the GNSO improvements structure – it’s the right moment I think.
However, by reading two documents, I haven’t really been able to find the term “At-Large” or “ALAC,” or “individual users.” There are terms of “individuals.” A few years ago when you guys started, we – ALAC – made a special plea to send or somehow get involved in your committee, which originally was not the case inaudible 57.14, you went there, not because we want to be exposed to, but more have a meaningful sort of thinking and intelligence together to be put into the strategy and directions of ICANN.
So… But don’t take it as a criticism but more of a suggestion that it might be more productive if you could extend the definition of the multistakeholder, which are mentioned several times, but it doesn’t really provide your definition or all understandings there can be. When ICANN started, they said it’s a stakeholder-based organization, but there are different interpretations of how the stakeholders are organized or represented – being advisory, being on the Board, and stuff like that. And how do you define? Is it individual users per individual, or collective groups? What’s the difference between civil society and the individual users? All are valid questions and it’s worse to further deepen that. And that could be partially our fault, that we didn’t really give you enough input. But also it’s sort of mutual, that, by the fact that haven’t really mentioned these, felt like “Oh, we are not really part of your subject. You’re more talking about the governmental or in a political strategic 58.34 thing” – high-level, and we are usually in the bottom so we may not be sort of, you know… And I’m sure that’s wrong, but I’d like to really see these to be discussed further in detail.
Thank you.
Cheryl: Thank you, Izumi. Adam.
Adam: Hello. In a similar sort of vein, and I apologize for not sending comments. I started to write them and then they went on and on and on and never got finished, which I think is quite common.
Similar vein, what I mean, was going to say was when I read the documents, I wondered how much sort of cross-ICANN joined-up policymaking was going on in your thinking and the way you’re addressing this because there is the ALAC Review going on, there is the GNSO Review going on, which is relevant, and there is the NomCom Review going on, which is also extremely relevant. And some of the things, if we look to accountability – and I’m thinking perhaps of a different thought of “accountability” – the Nominating Committee Review made some recommendations which I think have been largely rejected, but they were suggesting that the Board might split into a sort of functional Board and then an oversight Board – one that kept an eye on another, which is German model of, what do you call it, corporate governance.
And those type of things people have spoken about. Well, who will hold… Once the JPA is gone, who will hold ICANN accountable? ICANN itself or its internal structures? That seems to me to be somewhat… well, it’s a circular thing and isn’t really accountability in terms… Some kind of external structure may be desired, and I haven’t really seen great mention of that, but there’s elements there that I’d like to see considered and I think should be considered. So that’s one thing on accountability.
Thinking about issues of capture, one of the things I thought… I made a very bad intervention in Paris and gave up after losing my English, and what I wanted to say is that volunteerism, I think, is inherently open to capture, and I think Marylin, you and I are perhaps good example of this. We’ve been around in this for a long time. Is our contribution, because we’re willing to volunteer, an element of capture? I did four years of Nominating Committee which meant everybody who was appointed by the Nominating Committee had a bit of my opinion in them – that’s a terrible form of capture in that one person has had an influence on every person in the leadership position appointed by the NomCom. And your influence, Marylin, because you volunteer is extremely strong within this organization. Do we consider this as a… From the history of the organization. I mean this with the greatest respect. I’m, you know… Is that a form a capture, and is that inherent to the volunteer system that we’re actually developing and working with? You know, it’s a sort of interesting thing I think to think about, because it applies to other things as well – the IGF and other multistakeholder processes we’re trying to develop.
On multistakeholderism, I noted that the old PSC document began with a request to improve business participation. I was disappointed that the other part of that civil society, or users or non-profit wasn’t equally seen… or seen to be equally important, or at least there’s an indication that it wasn’t seen to be equally important because it wasn’t mentioned in the same way and with the same weight. If we’re going to be a multistakeholder organization then perhaps we should look at the WSIS and those definitions of multistakeholderism and try and say, “Does ICANN hold up well against that?” I’d suggest at the moment that it perhaps doesn’t. And I’ve spoken enough.
Cheryl: laughter You’re becoming psychic.
Yrjö: 19
Cheryl: Very short. Yes, please. Go ahead.
Yrjö: Just that… Thank you very much. I mean, we haven’t really taken a close look at the reviews and the material they could give, and I think that we have to do it. So much work is actually being done in various places and it’s very difficult follow. Voluntarism, to my mind it’s not capture because if we say that it is, then we have to rewrite a lot of political history in the world. And last but not least, these business people, they were mentioned in relation to… in answer to very specific complaints, and of course the other stakeholders would have been there also.
Cheryl: I have Carlos, I have Vanda, and because I’m feeling extraordinarily generous, I now have Beau. That really is the end of the line. Go ahead.
Carlos: 11
Interpreter: …simple question, sir. And an easy question. I think that under 24, you’re trying to reassure yourself of operational security and financial security. As I teach economics at the university, I’m talking of talking about traditional economy and traditional economy. Faced with the current crisis of traditional economy, I wish to know if you have taken any measure or taken any steps, and if this crisis can be… will be transferred to this new economy, the economy of reason, and 11 classical economy… are afraid and do not invest in the development in the measures of ICANN. I don’t want to reach the level of transparency. Now what are the measures of which you are referring to and which are the steps that you want to take? And thank you.
Marylin: So thank you. Let me clarify that we actually won’t be taking the steps, we will be proposing that ICANN take steps and asking you to comment on whether those steps are adequate. So one of the discussions we have had is all of you know that ICANN is facing… and I describe it as an operational tsunami of work, in relation to dealing at the same time with the introduction of major new numbers of gTLDs, introducing IDNs, and trying to play their role of supporting the awareness of the importance of the transition to IPv6.
They also have on their plate another very important issue that has emerged in the last several weeks. Some of you will have seen the announcement about the cache poisoning, the Kaminsky flaw, which raises and elevates the question about DNSSEC.
So we have an organization that has a huge amount of responsibility for sort of making sure that certain operational functions happen on an ongoing basis and are stable, right? Because the internet depends on certain stable, reliable, predictable functioning. Now ICANN does not run the internet nor do the registries and registrars run the internet. The internet is built and is run by ISPs, but the unique indicators that ICANN allocates and manages are critical to the online world. So its function has to be stable, predictable, reliable, fair, transparent.
As it… And that happen in spite of the economic downturn and it has to happen in spi-… So if… And I’ll just, you know, say hypothetically, so a hundred people want to run a new gTLD, but if the issue is that ICANN’s operational functioning is destabilized and it can’t perform the rest of its functions, then ICANN as a community has to make priority decisions in order to deal with that.
So we were trying to get at the idea that there have to be safeguards, so to speak, or, you know, the ability to be predictable. We also have talked about the fact that ICANN should have a significant reserve fund. It may be a year is not enough. You know, the point is… Let’s say that something absolutely unforeseen happens and people stop buying domain names, and ICANN’s funding is based on the collection of fees – well, it certainly would take us more than a year to figure what our next funding model was and we would have to run the organization while that happened.
So that’s kind of the thinking and the dialogue. You know, I would welcome hearing more from you guys – we’re going to be around afterward – about whether you think we’re, you know, touching on the right issues, but that’s kind of the priority we’re trying to give to that.
Cheryl: I have closed the list, Izumi. Sorry. We are now three minutes over our extension. If you are both concise, I will beg the indulgence of the committee members for another five minutes, if that’s suitable. Yes, it is. Please go ahead, Vanda, and then Beau.
Vanda: Yeah. Thank you, Marylin. I have the opportunity to watch the Washington in the web – it was very good. And we have a bunch of people together, it’s very good.
Marylin: Great.
Vanda: And, well, one question you 36 answered, but the other is not a question but a concern about the multistakeholder. I believe that multistakeholder is the most important gift from the ICANN to the history. And I believe that is not in fact really working right now and we need to guarantee that the model start to working better and continues to work to allow the other communities around the world to take this model. And in my point of view, we need to enforce a little bit the conditions the ICANN is running now the multistakeholder, because some issues are concerning me. First one is the participation of users is not well, you know, recognized or whatever word you want to use.
Cheryl: There’s plenty of other words.
Vanda: laughter Yeah. But in the other way, I’m 07 participation and something about govern being paid to participate, and I’m a little worried about that, you know, because once you have some of those dependents and in this kind of participation, you change completely the model. It’s… In an other way, it’s ICANN capturing the governs. So it’s something… laughter
Cheryl: That works.
Marylin?: 45
Vanda: Finally. Finally, Finally. Finally. But anyway, it’s not the pure multistakeholder working. So that’s some points that I’d like to have you in mind to talk about.
Cheryl: I now have a dream. Beau, do you wish to speak first? Or would you like to respond to that then now, or…?
Beau?: 14
Cheryl: Okay. If you would hold for just one moment. Please, go ahead, Pierre.
Pierre: Sorry. I just wanted to come back to this stakeholder, you know, thing, and thank you very much for bringing this up again, and to totally agree Izumi in fact in what was he referring to. And also I think at the beginning of the discussion of this PSC, that came, you know, high on the agenda, on the multistakeholder approach. And at some point or so you need to really face some of the issues that were there. For instance, when we were discussing, you know, the JPA, most of the comments also that were coming, it was about the business sector, then I think we spent time in even defining that one exactly.
The other issues is about, you know, okay, At-Large and the individual users. How do you really figure them in the whole thing? But I think that’s where my recommendation 13 is not just to put the questions. I think we also need some suggestions, a few suggestions on what we are really meaning about, you know… And then for me, it reminds me, you know, a few years back when were defining “At-Large,” who is At-Large? Who is civil society? Those things are there.
And the last thing is, okay, the comments we are receives 35. Why you guys not are not mentioning GAC? Or the governments? I mean, these are some of the things we are receiving so we say, “Fine. It can be a multistakeholder thing, model, but let’s define what we are really meaning by ‘multistakeholder’ and let’s see exactly…” When we mean individual users, how do we recognize, you know, its contribution to the whole thing? It’s not so simple.
So I’m just, you know, pleading that we collectively try to provide, you know, much more sensible definitions of those so that 11 into whatever document we are producing. Alright, so…
Cheryl: Thank you, and thank you so much for your time. I realize you need to leave. Beau, please go ahead.
Beau: Yeah. I’ll be quick because my comment echoes what you’ve been hearing over and over again, and in fact echoes what I wrote and my organization said during the whole JPA phase, which is this issue of stakeholders yet again. If you look at, you know, point 2 there where it says, “To strengthen ICANN’s accountability to its community” and you read in there, you don’t see the word “user” mentioned, you don’t see the word, you know, “regular human being” mentioned.
laughter
Beau: You say, you know, “accountable to the GAC” – the GAC is an organization that holds every meeting behind locked doors. So, you know, if you want to get more feedback the community of users, you’ve got to make it less obvious that you’re not listening.
Marylin: I do want to respond to that. We had a big discussion at the beginning. We had a big discussion at the beginning about whether we should be reaching into the review processes and sort of data mining them – pardon me for using that word – and taking into account what they were doing. And, you know, to some extent, I think we may… I’m listening to you and thinking, “Maybe we have taken some things for granted,” and that is that some of this other work about defining “multistakeholder” was going to be going on anyway. And we have tried to be pretty narrow about what we’re doing. Now what I’m hearing you say is “You got to get this definition agreed to by the community, got to articulate it, make sure it’s balanced, get it agreed to by the community in order to complete the rest of your assumptions and your work” – that’s kind of one thing I’m hearing, okay?
The other thing I’m saying, I’m telling is yes, you’re right. We have been responsive. As Pierre, we have been responsive to the people who rang us up, so to speak, by sending us a contribution and saying, “You ignored this, you ignored this, you ignored this.” You have now drawn to our attention that just because we didn’t hear from you doesn’t mean there’s not a lot on your mind, right? But I have a question for you, and I don’t mean today. I have a question for you. I think you have to tell us the present approach to public comment does not seem to be working. And I would say that myself because I can add 22 plus 14 – can’t go much beyond that – but that’s not a good number. That total’s not a good number.
So, you know, I think a question I’m going to ask on Thursday is, you know, do we need to have more… is the effective way to do this face-to-face? And if that’s the case, what’s the timing and, you know, how does it fit with your ability – “your” meaning community-wide – ability to participate? I don’t have an answer. You’ve given me a question.
Cheryl: It has been pointed out, and it is with great embarrassment and even more apology, that I skipped over one of my vice chairs. Sébastien, you have the honour of the last word other than my thanks to the committee.
Sébastien: Okay. Sorry. Yeah, I think what is interesting is that when we set up this session, we were a little bit afraid that it will be without no exchange, it will be difficult. And I see that we can spend hours, days even…
laughter
Yrjö?: We have no time! laughter
Sébastien: And we will have to fix that and to see how it’s possible. I just want to some small sentence, it will be rough, but the question of accountability. As I said in Geneva and as other people say, the knowledge, the people who know, the experts are the first ones who could capture. And in that respect, we need as At-Large organization your help for our summit because our goal in that summit, it’s to allow more people, more organization, and more countries to have experts, expertise and to become experts. More you have experts, less you have the possibility to capture. And it’s not just because it’s the 10th anniversary of ICANN, it’s not just because we set up ALAC and the five RALOs, it’s also a question of non-capturing the organization. And we need to work together on that issue.
Just a second word – I have many – but internationalization, I say it will be rough and it is. It’s not because you replace an US citizen to an Australian or New Zealander citizen, then you are internationalizing the organization. And I love all of them, no problem…
Cheryl: 05
Sébastien: …and I am very happy that we have Cheryl as chair of the ALAC once again…
laughter
Sébastien: …I want to say that again. But we really need to find other ways… And it’s not just a question of translating the documents, hundreds of pages. As I say very often and I will say once again, I prefer to have a business summary written in an international English that could be translated in other languages, but before it must be written in an English understandable by…
Marylin: Anyone.
Sébastien: …a lot of people.
Marylin: Yeah.
Sébastien: Most people. Like that we will make better. We don’t need hundred pages to be translated because we have no time to read it. And if one of us want to read it, then it’s another question, but generally speaking, we don’t need these hundred pages. But a good summary and a translation of the good summary will be better and we will put better the money in that type of work than translations of 12 paper.
Sorry. I have no time to say something else. I just want to thank you very much for this exchange and thank you for coming to us, because I think it was and it is a very important discussion we have to have together. Thank you very much.
Interpreter?: Microphone please, Madame. Microphone.
laughter
40 to 1.21.00
Cheryl: I trust you all have come out of that three-quarters of an hour believing – oh, thank you so much – believing that that was a very worthwhile exercise and that we are now better prepared to engage properly in the public workshop on Thursday. Which brings me to the point of our expectations, of course, is for us to engage intelligently at the public workshop on Thursday. It’s not a criteria that every single one of us line up and say the same thing. It would be a criteria if we can have a very similar exchange to what we had today, and there is no harm in repeating concisely much of what has been said.
Yes, Evan, go ahead.
Evan: My question, I guess, would be why leave it at that? Why leave it to specific questions launched in a specific thing? Mohamed just asked a question that I think is worth raising and I think is worth ALAC’s consideration, and this is creation of a liaison with this committee. I mean, one of the things that’s bothered me is that their definition of their… their definition of multistakeholder, their definition of the community just seems so out of synch with anything that we are dealing with. I would like to allow them… I would like to get them to agree on at least either having a liaison with us or some kind of mechanism that would allow us to shall we say inflict our…
Cheryl: Evan, I’m sorry. I’m just 45 because you’re not able to read what’s happening as well. Pierre who was here is the ALAC liaison to that committee. We have no ability to change him because it is… nor would I want to. It isn’t coming up for election or review, but that is the ALAC person on the committee – before my day – and it is at the President’s wish that they come or go. So if he for some reason was not able to continue, then the ALAC would be asked to replace them.
Evan: Well, then can I suggest that the ALAC may want to take the initiative and say that the relationship right now absolutely bites and that we ought to do something about it?
laughter
Evan: No, actually without using that language, I’m serious that there has to be some kind of assertion made that the relationship between the committee and the At-Large community is below substandard, and I don’t care if they replace an individual, they don’t replace an individual, but something needs to be done about this. Is this not worth something to address at something more than just a public comment?
Cheryl: I… I’m not struggling because I don’t have much to say, it’s that I have said much in the past and I have been given certain answers. I would caution against this being something to be raised at the public forum, but I totally endorse the fact that I will make mileage wherever possible – not necessarily in a public forum – of the fact that that is the first time I have ever set eyes on the ALAC liaison to the PSC.
Go ahead, Sébastien.
Sébastien: Yeah. First of all, about words – he’s not our liaison. He was speaking as a member of the PSC with the proposal of the ALAC at that moment, but he’s not a liaison, and that’s maybe one part of the difficulty of the situation. And I just want to urge you to discuss with him, of course, but discuss with the other members. Marylin Cade, I know her since the beginning I was participating at the ICANN meeting. She came from the business constituency. I was participating to the business constituency too – it’s one big illness, but sometimes we recover. But she’s very aware of what is happening also in the At-Large area and she’s very open. I can say that for Jean-Jacques Subrenat who is Board member from France elected by the NomCom last year, and so on and so forth. Then we may interact with those people.
The goal really today of this part of the meeting was to open this discussion and to allow as much as possible people to be aware of the subject and to participate. And we… I don’t think it’s 59 working. It’s like that. The question of the multistakeholderism, I wanted to say – and it seemed when I was outside that you say something the reverse – but I really prefer the multistakeholderism within ICANN than the one within IGF, and ICANN really discussed with you on that for some time because ICANN was the first one to set up this type of diversity and it’s better done than it was and it is done in… with this in the IGF process. I am really ready to work on that topic. I think we need to find some words to say during this weekend and after about this consultation and those consultations, and I would be happy to work on that. Thank you.
Cheryl: Izumi, but I would also note the clarification that is going on the wiki with us using the term “liaison.” I responded and did not delete that word from response. It is my error for having done that. And also, Fatimata, I think it is important to know we do not have a problem or even a perception of a problem, we have a situation where somebody has been appointed and that appointment is a finite and defined thing. It was at the request of the ALAC that that was done and Izumi and Hong were here at that time and they’re probably best equipped to explain that and I’d like to offer them the opportunity to do that. There is no perception that there is a problem, but there is no connection back to us. It was very heartening for me to hear that he said he feels at home here, this is where… you know, this is the ALAC.
Izumi, and then I will ask you Hong to contribute as well. And then Vanda. Go ahead, Izumi.
Izumi: The first thing is that, the one I wanted to talk to them, but because I was late to, but I think it’s still worth to share with my colleagues, is a point not related to the liaison or not. What I felt missing from the current version of the two documents from PSC might be perhaps the need to explore the relationship with other organizations which relates to but not directly under the purview of ICANN. For example, the case for IPv6, or v4/v6 and an interesting thing that ICANN alone cannot solve. We know that at some point that v4 will be gone out. I had a very interesting and difficult discussion earlier this year with some of the Board members that “No, no, no, the 52 is not under our mandate. So we can only deal with how to assign the addresses, but how to operate that is beyond our scope.” And I asked who’s taking care of. “Well, not us. Not IETF, not…” Ooh. You know? But it’s a mutual problem. And like what if the domain names aren’t gone or people are not going to use it, then can ICANN per se solve that? I don’t think so.
There are many other areas and ICANN was quite often criticized that we are in a very narrow silo and not really interact. But I understand still that well, that’s our technical mission or, you know, our given thing. But if it is for this strategic thing, then we may be able to go beyond that given mandate of today and go, you know, out of the box. So again, it’s not a criticism, but ALAC itself also can really explore that.
For the liaison thing, I think that we may have some different understandings of the role of Pierre at the PSC. Even though we strongly advocated to have sort of a member from us or somebody from us, it didn’t mean that he will act neither our representative nor liaison. After you’re selected to the Board, likewise you act for the entire sort of benefit of, not the constituency. So that we need to engage with him or we need to go forward and see it works or not before discussing about removing or things like that.
Cheryl: 30 Please, let me clarify for the record. No discussion of removal. What I was saying is it is at the President’s pleasure that these people serve on his committee. Therefore the only indicator for any change would be an inability to continue.
Izumi: Yeah. And Pierre and Marylin said that we better give substantive suggestions or areas that we’d like to see them to take it on.
Cheryl: Hong, if you would like to?
Hong: Oh. Okay, thanks. With respect to this liaison issue, I will follow what Izumi-san said just now. It happened in 2006, perhaps at Marrakech meeting. ALAC recommended Pierre to be a member of PSC and he was appointed indeed by the President. So he’s a member, he’s never been a liaison for ALAC to PSC.
I’ve another point that I also want to deliver to them, but they left. Can I say it now? Oh, okay. Right. It’s about point 3, internationalization of ICANN. It seems that ICANN emphasizes those physical or administrative internationalizations such as setting regional offices or organizing regional meetings. But what is interesting is that when they’re doing this, they did very little consultation in that region. Especially recently, they have a new office in India, South Asia, but people in Asia never heard about this office and we still don’t know whether this office is providing any support for East Asia. laughter And they have some…
Female?: 20
Hong: You don’t know that? Oh, I talked with Mr. Twomey in Beijing, so that’s very true. Your President confirmed that. laughter
Nick: 30 staff even knows that.
Hong: Oh, well, that is very surprising. In New Delhi.
Vanda: It’s GAC Secretariat.
Hong: Oh, it’s a Secretariat, not an office? pause Okay. Oh, I’m sorry for that.
And for the regional meetings, I think this is even more problematic. They organized a regional meeting in Taipei for Asia Pacific region, but neither Izumi nor I heard about this meeting. We were not invited. We were not able to attend, even though there was a regional meeting in Asia… Okay.
Cheryl: Very valid points. laughter Very valid points. Vanda and then Evan.
Vanda: Just to add some issue here. When Paul appoints someone, it’s by himself to appoint. That’s the mandate. But what I know, that he just consults people from the region or the community they belong to. So that is the point. The point is not the liaison, it’s not the recommend, but it’s listen, “What do you suggest?” as 56 time inaudible.
The other point I’d like to raise, it’s about the model for international ICANN. We had a lot of discussion in the past about… inside the Board included, how to use the model, because it’s a quite new organization. There is no model around, so how we move from this non-profit organization set up in some place in response to the DoC, to an international really organization wherever they are centred, there is no point. But how is the model? How can this be really recognized by the nations, by the community? There is an international organization? That is the main point for the future of ICANN in my opinion, and this is dependent on the multistakeholder works very well. They have all the governs agree with the model. So there is a lot of the community accepted that is something that represents them, so there is a lot of things to debate that is under some points but not connected in this… I send some message during the Washington, I was attending, but anyway, the idea is to have more connected in all those questions because in the end, the whole questions needs to appoint to one direction – what is the new ICANN in the future?
Cheryl: Thank you, Vanda. And I think it’s a future that we’d like to see ourselves involved with.
Evan, go ahead.
Evan: Is there some kind of specific action that we want to take as a group to make clear to the committee that the relationship has been nonexistent, that there is a channel that we would like to open, and that we would like to figure out a way to do it? I mean, supposedly we have people that are trying to look after the various communities. As you know, as I mentioned, I did make a submission to the committee. I have received zero response from them since. So in terms of their interest, even when we do try and participate, it’s basically “Okay. Now go away.”
What would be… So I’m just trying to figure out… Rather than complaining, I’m trying to figure out a constructive way to engage this. So even if, for instance… And I’ll go back to my request before about the idea of putting… of designating a liaison. Even if they do not create a liaison, we perhaps ought to have somebody who is monitoring what they’re doing. When they do an event, that person would then find out about it and then notify the appropriate RALO so we don’t have meetings in offices happening in Asia and Asia Pac does not get told, or having meetings in Washington and NARALO doesn’t get told, etc., etc. Having a person who they don’t nec-… We don’t need them to agree on our choice of liaison if somebody who keeps up with them, keeps contact with them, and keeps informed of and by them, which is what I’m asking. Who they’ve put on their committee, whether or not it was officially to liaise with ALAC or not, clearly they haven’t – we know that as an issue of fact, they have not bothered. Even when we’ve reached out to them by submitting, they haven’t bothered to answer back. So is it reasonable to designate either a person or a group of people to say, “We are going to keep on top of that, we’re going to make sure they’re aware of that even though they may not want to”?
Cheryl: If I could take the opportunity to respond to that, Evan, I think it’s… again, it’s a nomenclature. I don’t want to use the word “liaison” because that has particular entrapments in our current rules of procedure, etc., etc. and 58 elections and all sorts of thing wrapped around. But a watching brief from within our structure absolutely would be an ideal situation. There is a very… What I think is actually a very good open interface of information able to be cherry-picked by whomever takes on that watching brief on the ICANN website now, so it would be I think fairly easy to get a small group within our infrastructure whose role it is to make sure that we are better working with them.
But it doesn’t address the issues of how any work we do is responded to. That’s an almost systemic problem with all sorts of parts of ICANN, including this committee. We certainly can address that in a number of ways, not the least of which is in the review processes that are going on at the moment, and don’t lose sight of the fact that the ALAC mid-point discussion paper on our review said other ACs and SOs need to be working with us, and there’s lots of very important things there.
I see Fatimata. Okay.
The opportunities are actually perfect right now because the PSC is the topic or one of the two major topics that the joint AC and SO meeting is going to be addressing, and that’s going to be public-mic’ed, eh? We want interaction. We want to end up at those sessions saying, “We now recognize the issues that the ALAC have, the issues that the GAC has, the issues that the GNSO issues, the issues that generally people on the floor have.” We then have our own meeting time and activities, and it’s an ideal time to get our little working group up and going, right? On Thursday when we come back to the final joint session, we can give some opinion pieces, we can report, and so it’s a perfect time to do exactly what you suggest.
Fatimata, go ahead, please.
Fatimata: Thank you, Cheryl. I’m just wondering if we cannot have some privileged relationship with Pierre, as he was an ALAC member and he’s now serving… he’s now working with the PSC. Can we ask him to do us some kind of favour so that we can benefit from a better relationship with this committee and be more informed about what’s going on?
Cheryl: Sounds perfect to me. Go ahead, Evan.
Evan: That’s exactly what I’m suggesting – having us designate some people that give him a polite phone call, say, “Hi. We’d like to ensure that there’s an ongoing channel.” Whether it’s him… I mean, he seems to be the obvious person for that, but I mean essentially whether it’s with the chair of the committee or whether it’s him, just making sure that “Yes, we have somebody designated to talk to you, to listen to you, anytime you want to talk to the At-Large, we have… here’s your point of contact,” and just to make the process as easy as possible for them.
Cheryl: Short answers? Yes, let’s do that. And I think again it’s an ideal opportunity because we’ve had our meeting, we can say, “From our discussions on… we believe it will be wonderful if we can have a more free and frank dialogue, and…” Go ahead, Sébastien.
Sébastien: If Pierre came here, it was the middle of his meeting, it’s because I asked him to come and he was willing to come. And when I discussed with him, he’s really willing to discuss with any one of you and if we can set up a meeting where he can come, he will coming and there is no problem for that, and let’s take this opportunity to discuss with him in whichever you want.
Cheryl: So the answer’s yes, let’s do it. Any other points on the PSC?
I was fearful that on Monday’s session when the facilitator has all the chairs of the SOs and ACs up on stage and turns to me and says, “What is the At-Large and RALO and community view on the PSC?” I was going to say, “Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn.” I am absolutely delighted to hear that is not the case. laughter This is I believe a very important issue, and when it was raised at the ALAC meeting, it was raised at the ALAC meeting at one of those horrible times when several other things were time-critical and it was in fact a deliberate decision to say, “We do not have time to make a formal response to this,” and I personally very much regret. I think it was a very sad situation.
So thank you personally for everything you’ve given me, but we need to see you and hear you at the microphones. And believe me, just because I’m on stage supposedly being grilled, it won’t stop me saying, “Evan, you have a point to make. Would you like to come forward to the mic?” laughter “Izumi, would you like to come up and speak?” I really will, and I’m not going to let you get away with it either, 42, you’re going to be coming to the microphone. We need to have public participating. And thank you for that.
Yes, go ahead, Evan.
Evan: But rather than have a couple of statements like that, like I say, I think the first thing is rather than come out with some knee-jerk things this week is to say this is the start of a process, we want to open communications to them, and rather than just have… You know, we’re starting from scratch basically, and so rather than just say, “We have some knee-jerk reactions right now,” let’s set up this dialogue, set up this conduit so that ALAC is better informed and they’re better informed where we’re at.
Cheryl: And what the aim of the joint meetings is, to highlight areas of mutual interest, agreement, or concern, not make the solutions. So that fits in absolutely perfectly.
It leads me to the other part. They’re also going to say what do we all feel about this new gTLD thingy. You know that hundred… two hundred! I keep saying it’s only a hundred. How many pages is this beast that you’ve given me to read?
Vanda: I don’t know. It’s… 45
Cheryl: I was… Because there is a tome under my feet here – I’m using it as a footrest.
laughter
Cheryl: We need to not drill down into details but I can assume there will be a couple hot topics, but please make sure I have captured all of them.
Go ahead, Adam.
Adam: Cost? I think if I remember correctly the ALAC was concerned about the cost being exclusionary of not-for-profit organizations, developing countries, and so on, and while I do think they justify why they’ve done it, they’ve said that this round will be costly and in the future the money we raise from this will be used to allow for, you know, lower cost. It’s still something to try and remember what was said previously and I think cost is probably the first one.
Cheryl: I… Yes, go ahead, Patrick.
Patrick VW: Yes. Well, regarding cost, I much agree with Adam and I would have to add that I’ve seen nowhere in these documents – although I confess I haven’t read them all yet – but I haven’t seen nowhere a real breakdown of the costs. I mean, $185,000 just to fly. Even if you pay the 03 $300 per hour, it still represents a long time. I’ve calculated it, it’s more or less like four months’ work full-time to evaluate one application. That doesn’t seem to make much sense. And especially since at every step you can have additional costs in case of comparative evaluations, if you have to go through 33 process and so on. So I think we’ve been talking about transparency in another context, but it would be helpful if ICANN could really tell us what they are doing with all this money.
Cheryl: And I hope to see you at the microphone saying exactly that. laughter Mohamed and then Sébastien.
Mohamed: Actually, I was going to say the same thing that Patrick already said is an issue. I heard today from one of the ICANN staff that if the applicants are non-profit organizations, there might be a special considerations in terms of costing. And if the applicant’s application has been rejected, there’s also the current discussion they said 26 inaudible. But it’s also, it’s good that we’re at the point that we need to know exactly is it the right costing or not?
Cheryl: Sébastien, and please 38.
Sébastien: Yeah. Cost, it was one important issue, and they want to have costs recovered since the inception of ICANN, and as you heard, they need to have more money to be able to handle crisis and they will not give that for free. And we have to be careful because if one organization sets up a few candidates as a non-profit organization and they are both the next year 1.4911, I just want to take the example of that name, where we are with that, what we do with that. And it’s not just saying that it must be less expensive, but maybe what are the criteria to have different costs and what are the… it’s ta-… For me, it’s a little bit like when a company asks for money to hire new people, and after they get this money they close the factory.
Cheryl: laughter Okay. Yes, please, go ahead, Schombe.
Schombe: 52
Interpreter: I think the cost is very, very important because if this price is not well regulated and that a governmental body is not able to satisfy this criteria, this organization, there will be many users who will blocked and even some communities can be blocked because very often these is done for the benefit of 24 communities. And I think it’s a problem which should be settled and something which we have encountered frequently. It’s a problem that we should try to settle. Thank you.
Cheryl: And again, we will have you back at the microphone on new gTLDs too, won’t we, sir? laughter Okay. Izumi, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Izumi: Thank you. Yes, the cost is seemingly a big challenge. Rather than sort of… Well, I would like to see it’s more incremental, starting with a lower fee to enter. And then especially in relation to that is that to me it seems that even you make an error in the application, it looks like you have to pay everything and you lose that. That’s seemingly unfair and there’s no real, at least on this document, sort of a consultation process if you’re the first time to apply and you tried with your best knowledge but you can’t, then it gives automatic advantage to the incumbents. So the intention of this opening up the new gTLD, while the namespace might be expand, that 39 like registries may not be the case. And if you look at the distribution of the existing registries, then it’s fairly imbalanced in many ways.
So I’d rather like to have more sort of attentive attitude or policy to help guide those new applicants to have sort of a level playing field for the entry. It’s not only the cost issue per se of the amount – even if you have a lot of money, it doesn’t mean that you will get there.
Similarly, I sort of understand to set the high sort of entry barrier so that you will not have to deal with some silly applications of, you know, to thousands. Having said that, if you say like you have to commit $50,000 US, for example, and you will be given back some refund if you fail – for $30,000 whatever – then it might be easier, because it’s more rational to pay more if you are closer to the… if not even the final list. So that kind of more – you know, I don’t know how you call this – incremental approach of some sort, these should be considered or I’d like to propose that.
Cheryl: If I may, and being very aware that we will be finishing at 6 o’clock which is two minutes of time, what I’m hearing is that whilst we still remain supportive as we ever have been of expansion of the namespace, better choice, better opportunities particularly for community and geographic names, and 27 necessary – and we’ve not mentioned them but believe me I will be, IDNs and particularly IDNs in ccTLDs – we remain concerned about some aspects and would like to talk further. Our number one concern is in fact with the cost, and there are a number of layers that we’d like to raise later, expecting you all then to come up and back me up by coming to the microphone and actually saying a few things, but they do include the disadvantage to not-for-profits and analysis, and, and, and… The level playing field I think is a very important thing to also highlight.
The other thing I am shocked to my very core that none of you have given it to me because you’ve actually listed all the ones I said to them when they put us through the rehearsal last night, laughter nobody mentioned morality and public order. And I don’t know about you but I still remain very concerned about the implementation of how that particular one is going to… laughter So we do… We will… I’m going to raise that. It won’t be number one, but I am going to raise that.
Go ahead, Nick.
Nick: I wanted to note that there’s a specific explanatory memorandum in the new gTLD documentation on that exact topic. There is also I would just say to you all, as some of you know this independently, there are no other copies of the complete set of new gTLD documents at this meeting. We had them made for all of you because we knew this was important, and Glen had some made at the same time for the GNSO. So don’t lose those.
laughter
Vanda?: You can… 14
Nick: You will not… You will not find them laying around anywhere else at this meeting.
Evan: But you might find them on eBay.
laughter
Vanda: And sell them.
Nick: We will have… The other language versions of them will not be available probably until the meeting is ended. So unfortunately… That’s why we produced only English versions.
Cheryl: Ah. Ah, there we go. Is there any last words? If… Yes, go ahead, Izumi, very quickly.
Izumi: On the morality thing, may I?
Cheryl: Would you like to take it online…? Oh, very quickly.
Izumi: Because I read it and had some idea. First reaction, I might have been naïve, is it’s better than the original or the previous one with vague definition or vague direction only. It has certainly much stronger component to protect the human rights, free speech, stuff like that.
Having said that, I was a little bit puzzled that they haven’t really displayed the sources of consultation and expertise. They say 20 and stuff like that but none are really cited, and that would add perhaps more value if they can indicate where they went.
A more specific one, only one point, in page 5 they are talking about the incitement to the promotion of discrimination based upon race, colour, gender, stuff like that. I was wonder whether in a real case scenario like the triple-X thing, whether this new proposal 48 inviting drugs or organized criminal activities. While it’s very difficult that it is very grey, these are the really, the sources of our real problems for phishing and all the internet-based criminals, but it’s very difficult to sort of regulate existingly. And this new gTLD may be opening up the new, you know, ways for… and later we might be held responsible, something like that. But I was surprised that none of these specifically mentioned. That should be I think there.
Cheryl: Izumi, I think they’re extraordinarily important points, and again, I will do the lead-in. I will pitch you the morality and public order. I need people lined up… Well, it’s not actually going to be lined up at the microphone. Just raise your hand, it will be a roving mic. I really believe it’s a real opportunity for us to move our points of view forward in a very successful way and for the first time be heard with the intent of seeing exactly how each of the SOs’ and ACs’ community views are developing.
I’d like to thank you all for the enormous efforts that you’ve put in today. I’d like to wish those of you who are dining together tonight, good luck and bon appétit. I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart the translators and all the work they’ve done today, especially… 16
Interpreter: “Interpreters,” Madame.
applause
Cheryl: And does this need to go on the public record? Go ahead, Evan.
Evan: Yes. And please, I beg everyone to have a look at the Google Document regarding the summit session planning that I’m still working on, almost done. So before Wednesday, if you have any input, it’s a Google Document called “Summit Session List.” Skype or e-mail me if you don’t have access to it. I’m looking for contribution.
Cheryl: And we will all be meeting tomorrow in the main hall from opening on. Thank you all.
End of Audio
