Attendees: Members of the At-Large Community and the Non-commercial Users Constituency of the GNSO Council
M Mueller gave a short summary of his proposal of a new user constituency in the GNSO Council and presented diagrams with the two options; a constituency going on to a policy committee or each constituency having both an executive and a policy committee. The second option might strain the ability of the group. He also evoked the issue of a cumulative voting system in which each member would receive 6 votes and then distribute them to council candidates with the advantage that the minority viewpoints could concentrate their effort on getting 1 of the 6 councillors on the Board. A setback to that would be the council members might spend all their time appealing to minority groups. He asked the ALAC for their opinion about the proposal.
C Aguirre asked for a definition of what small, medium and large organisations are.
M Mueller referred him to the current NCUC Charter and said that, to a certain extent, the distinction was arbitrary.
A Greenberg asked specifications concerning the new constituencies formation process. Will they have to be approved by the Board or could they be self-forming at the discretion of the NCSG. He stresses that too many constituency statements would render the whole process untenable and asked whether they could be new NCSG floating members who would not account to any constituency. Lastly, he raised the issue of whether the future elected Council Members would act as free agents or be still linked to the NCSG in some form, stressing that membership on a Council could take different values (opportunity to speak, voting right...).
M Mueller said that the formation process proposal for the constituencies was still under examination for the Board to decide, but he assumed the Board will retain that responsibility. The PDP was also going to be redefined. He added that, to his mind, the Council Members should not be completely free agents but the other extreme of them having to consult the entire stakeholder group should be avoided otherwise they may miss deadlines and be paralyzed.
C Langdon-Orr , speaking from an At Large position, as an ISOC representative of APRALO, wondered about where a body such as the Australian Communication Consumer Action Network, representing every Australian consumer of telecommunication would fit in.
M Mueller answered that the votes in themselves did not win the elections but the arguments and that he did not make categorical distinctions within the larger organizations
A Greenberg asked whether the votes only related to the councillor’s election or also to other issues on a regular basis.
M Mueller specified that currently there was an Executive Committee that made decisions on administrative matters, but it remained undetermined as to the future and he was open to advice.
C Aguirre said that he did not agree with the break down of organizations by their size, it was self-contradictory. He wanted to know how ALSes can participate in the new constituencies and in the NSCG and what the voting system implied.
M Mueller said that any At Large structure, wanting to join NCSG, if as an individual, should refer to the provisions for individual membership criteria and sign a pledge stating that it is not a member of a commercial stakeholder group and advocates public interest positions. He raised the problem of time scarcity to participate in both At Large and NCSG.
A Greenberg asked M Muller about the cumulative versus non cumulative voting system
M Muller stated that under a cumulative voting system, one could distribute the votes allotted to them between one or more candidates while the non cumulative system implied that all the votes went to only one candidate.
I Aizu asked what the difference between a constituency and an organization was. Was a constituency composed of several organizations?
M Mueller noted that constituencies could represent various interests. There could be a constituency of free speech advocates for example. Constituencies were different to working groups in that they are were not necessarily geared towards a concrete output and could have different members.
I Aizu said that the ALAC review noted that At-Large is the only channel for individual users.
M Mueller explained that the constituencies were linked together by a statement and had specific interests, i.e. there could be an anti-privacy constituency or a freedom of expression constituency, the latter might not be interested dealing with the registrar transfer agreement. They were like standing working groups. He gave the example of a fictitious Chinese-language constituency interested on IDN policy development. He further added that it was no longer needed to be a member of any stakeholder group to be on a working group and that the suggestion made in Alac Review Report of ALAC being the only channel for the end-user voices was not at conflict with the fact that a constituency could be a channel for individual users. ALAC was the place for internet end-users to work collectively on policy issues. The individual end users joining a NCSG were only asserting the voices of anyone else but themselves.
S Bachollet expressed the opinion that being member of a constituency and being a constituency were two different things. He expressed concern about the low membership threshold for forming a constituency (5 people).
M Mueller argued that it was a minimum of 5 members not 5 people and that the intention was to make it easy to form a constituency. Having potentially 5 likeminded people wanting to volunteer to work on an issue could certainly not hurt.
B Brendler wondered about the added value of having more forms of user’s representatives and the ALAC role in that picture.
A Greenbergs commented that the Board was asking where the users should fit. He stated the various slightly different grammatical constructs used at ICANN in reference to the user’s voice representation and asked whether they referred to different groups of people. In his view, the user’s input needed by ICANN had to come from people able to straddle the uninitiated user worlds with the technical vernacular and the ICANN terminology, and not just any end-user.
E Leibovitch said that ICANN bounced between different user definitions. He believed that the fact that users were so badly defined lead to capture of interest. It lead to the false impression of having reach out to the community of end-users with questions and surveys when, in actual facts, nothing of substance had been achieved.
C Preston asked Milton whether he presumed in his proposal that the same person would have a vote in a NCSG and also be a representative in ALAC
M Mueller Stated in reply that by ‘supporting organization’ (SO) in the membership statement, they meant that a NCSG member could not be at the same time also a member of BCSG, or a registrar, or a registry. However, they were no inherent conflicts of interests with At Large members, as long as these pledged to be non commercial in their policy perspectives. If it were not the case, then the Commercial Stakeholder group was there place to be.
C Samuels explained that he had to have different interests and represent different capacities in different arenas because of lack of people able to do it in his region. Thus, he resented the fact that this reality was not recognized in the discussion.
M Mueller said that AlAC could address any GNSO/CCNSO issue for those who found that the NCSG constraints made it impossible to affiliate to. While, the NCSG membership criterias were designed to prevent the potential conflicts of interests and were important to maintain as such.
The meeting was then closed.
