[council] NCDNHC and DNSO dues

["Milton Mueller" <Mueller@syr.edu>]

August 21, 2001

Fellow Name Councillors:

I want to update you on the status of the NCDNHC's efforts
to pay its dues, and to clarify some of the related issues.

The NCDNHC is a large and very diverse collection of
organizations that have never worked together prior
to the creation of ICANN. It took us until June 2001 
(the Stockholm meeting) to finally pass a resolution 
authorizing the mandatory collection of membership dues 
from the member organizations. A previous proposal to 
charge membership dues (submitted by myself) was defeated 
in Melbourne. The persistence of certain members in 
getting this through ought to be noted.

According to our rules, the results of the face to face 
meeting must be ratified by an online vote. This was
supposed to happen by July 2001. However, the Internet 
Society, which until then hosted our membership list, 
suffered technical problems which, without warning, 
completely disabled our communication for more than a 
month.

As of August 20 we have established a new email list
and have carefully made the transition so that no members
will be left out of any important decisions. 

We are now ready to authorize ICANN to invoice our 
members for contributions to the DNSO, and if the
Stockholm resolution is ratified by online vote, as
I expect it will be soon, any organizations not paying
those dues will cease to be voting members of NCDNHC
as of March 2002. I expect that we will be able to
raise the required amounts going forward, but of course
I do not know for sure.

The point I want to emphasize is that our "delinquency"
thus far has NOT been a willful refusal to pay but a
byproduct of the difficult process of developing the
organizational capacity to pay.

It follows that threats to impose interest charges,
cut off votes, etc., will have absolutely no impact on
our ability or willingness to pay. All we need is the
time to implement our plan.

Indeed, the sanctions proposed by the Budget Committee 
would be counterproductive. If they are implemented
just as our dues-collection process gets underway,
the value proposition that might encourage existing 
NCDNHC members to pay their dues is fatally undermined.
How can we ask budget-strapped non-profits to pay dues
to an organization that refuses to allow them to vote in
the DNSO? How will the NCDNHC ever catch up with the
interest charges that will almost certainly pile up as
we continue to fall behind arbitrary deadlines? The impact
of a rigid imposition of sanctions will simply be to 
destroy the NCDNHC.

Perhaps this is what some people want. I believe that 
the majority of the NC and DNSO, however, do not want
that. Certainly it would be hard to argue that the 
missing money is critical to the operation of the DNSO;
at any rate, destruction of a constituency via rigid
application of sanctions would ensure that that money
will always be missing.

Fellow Council members, shall I go forward with the
NCDNHC's plan to implement membership dues? Can I tell
my members in good faith that the DNSO values and needs
their participation and will bear with them while the
dues-collection processes are put into place and given 
time to work? 

Please give me your guidance.

Milton Mueller