Re: [ga] remote participation

[Jonathan Weinberg <weinberg@msen.com>]

At 04:51 PM 2/20/01 -0500, Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law wrote:
>On Tue, 20 Feb 2001, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
>> This said, maybe a way to go could be to experiment once a completely
online 
>> meeting. In other words, of the 4 meetings per year, why can't we organize 
>> one fully online?
>> 
>I think this is a brilliant idea!

	I'm hesitant, at least for now, about doing this *instead of* a f2f
meeting.  On several occasions so far, it seems to me, the ICANN staff and
Board have gone into a meeting with a policy plan in place (and have put
the word out that the plan was locked in, so that no sensible person would
bother opposing it), and then made an eleventh-hour swerve at the meeting,
once they found themselves locked in a hotel with a lot of people many of
whom were telling them that the plan was a Really Bad Thing.  This is no
way to run a railroad, to be sure, but it's preferable to a system in which
the Board actually goes ahead and enacts previously-announced,
ill-considered, devoid-of-public-support plans.  My concern about fully
online meetings is that the critical online comments wouldn't get much
attention from the Board members, and so the meeting would have the same
effect on the Board as no meeting at all.

	It's surely correct that the physical meetings privilege the people who
can attend, who are predominantly those on corporate expense accounts or
representing deep-pocketed clients.  Public-interest representatives have
had some small opportunity to attend as well, though, and that's one way
they've had of getting their voices heard.  I worry that a system of online
meetings, in which Board members are freed from the burden of listening to
the f2f objections of actual people, will end up privileging corporate
representatives (who, after all, have other points of entry to the ICANN
decisionmaking process) even more than the existing system, and that it may
lead to a greater number of Board decisions based on the mistaken belief
that proposed actions enjoy widespread public support.

Jon


Jonathan Weinberg
weinberg@msen.com
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