[ga-nominations] Accepting the nomination

[Thomas Roessler <roessler@does-not-exist.org>]

(I'm asking for your pardon if this message's formatting is awful - I'm 
on the train currently.)

1a.  Full name of nominee: Thomas Roessler
1b.  E-mail address of the nominee: roessler@does-not-exist.org

1c.  Background information about the nominee:

In real life, I'm a student of mathematics who's almost done.  Besides 
that, I'm interested in network security, and I'm the current maintainer 
of the mutt mail user agent. Finally, I've been interested in internet 
governance for quite some time now, and have been following ICANN 
matters rather closely since mid-2000.  One of my first ICANN-related 
activities was to start the icann-europe mailing list, which was 
reasonably successful at its time, but is rather inactive right now.

Conflicts of interest: I've co-edited a minor standards track RFC, I'm a 
.org domain name holder, and I'm maintaining the icann-europe mailing 
list.

1d.  Statement of the nominee's objectives in the role as GA Chair

My primary objective is to make the GA mailing list a place where 
reasonable and intelligent discourse can take place.  I believe that the 
GA will and should have a place in the ICANN process if and only if it 
manages to produce coherent and intelligent output, and if it becomes an 
environment which may be attractive even to those who do have a live 
besides the net.

I don't believe that I'd be able to achieve this all alone: Indeed, by 
submitting this acceptance, I hope that I will be elected as chair or 
alternative chair (alternative chair-preferred) together with Alexander 
Svensson, so we can work as a team.  Even more importantly, what's 
needed is the goodwill and activity of the GA's members.  We'll need 
volunteers who are willing to help as list monitors, and election 
watchdogs.  We'll need volunteers who are willing to represent the GA on 
names council task forces, and help to tunnel important discussions and 
insights back and forth between the GA and the respective task forces. 
We may also need volunteers to chair physical GA sessions if the chair 
and the alternative chair are unable to attend such meetings due to time 
and budget constraints.

Some initial steps to make the GA a better place include:

* Back the list monitors' decisions.  There's a lot of slander, 
off-topic postings, and generally bad manners going on on the GA list. 
  This has to stop, even if it means that some members of this mailing 
list have to be banned from posting to it for some time.

* Try to help structuring discussions, so they lead to actual results. 
  This can just mean asking the right questions, but it can also mean 
that a formal drafting and decision-making process is established.  The 
Best Practices or, for instance, some process derived from the W3C 
working group process could be applied - or some combination of these 
(the aspects from the W3C process I'm thinking of are kind of orthogonal 
to the Best Practices).

* Try to make it easier to follow the list by producing summaries of 
discussions on a more or less regular basis.  Take a look at the kernel 
cousins web page to see what I have in mind.  Note that this is not 
something the chairs have to do - indeed, just about every member of 
this list could volunteer.  Also note that such summaries would only 
make sense when there are actually interesting discussions to be 
summarized.

* Do some housekeeping: We have quite a few defunct sublists, some of 
which have been unused since July.  We should get rid of these.

Finally, a word of warning: I most likely won't be able to attend 
in-person meetings of the GA at annual ICANN meetings. I certainly will 
not be able to attend such meetings without funding.


PS: An explanation for the timing of this acceptance may be in order, in 
particular because I have declined the nomination in a private message 
to Elisabeth Porteneuve some time ago.  I had hoped that some candidate 
I could support would show up on the list of possible candidates.  In 
this case, I would have happily refrained from being a candidate myself, 
and would have volunteered to help as a list monitor. This hope also was 
the reason for the slew of nominations I sent last night.  Bad enough, 
it seems that things didn't work out this way.


Merry christmas,
-- 
Thomas Roessler (mobile) <roessler@does-not-exist.org>