April 2007

This is necessarily a short report, as I only took up the post of Chair at the Lisbon meeting on March 26th.

In addition to chairing the At-Large meetings at the Lisbon meeting, I did the following:

Outreach and Participation

The ALAC Chair now has access to the ICANN Blog for a monthly (or more frequently) update to the ICANN community. I've done one introductory post. Check category ALAC.

Met with the GM, Public Participation and the Director At Large about tools for individual internet user participation. They are in the process of setting up a tool that will allow us to easily poll individual internet users on policy topics of interest. We hope to run a test in May.

NARALO -In conjunction with At Large and Global Partnerships staff, at the request of some NA ALSes, requested funding for and got approval for a NARALO formation meeting in Yonkers, NY in early May. This meeting is being partially sponsored by a candidate ALS.

That's about it.

Jacqueline A. Morris

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NA ALAC members are considering whether this "request" for a meeting was real or astroturf.

contributed by guest@socialtext.net on 2007-04-09 19:08:07 GMT

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This NA member (Wendy) would like to know which ALSs requested a meeting and why they have engaged in no on-list discussion of the subject. For that matter, we've never heard a report from the Vancouver meeting for which ICANN provided support.

I have the highest respect for you, Jacqueline, but I believe this process is being manipulated by ICANN staff who are pushing toward RALO formation when the North Americans who have been actively involved in policy discussion oppose it.

--Wendy

contributed by guest@socialtext.net on 2007-04-10 00:57:14 GMT

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Wendy said: "we've never heard a report from the Vancouver meeting for which ICANN provided support."

With respect, there was no ICANN support of the Vancouver outreach event hosted by Telecommunities Canada, except that the Ombudsman came in person to speak to ICANN background. We did help in the testing of ALAC video conferencing software (i.e. we utilized the online meeting space). Frankly software glitches, particularly re audio, definitely inhibited the progress of the event. TC would have been better off to use its own resources to facilitate remote participation.

– Garth Graham

contributed by guest@socialtext.net on 2007-04-10 02:47:11 GMT

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Thanks for the clarification Garth. I would have liked to join, but was travelling at the time, and it sounds as though the software would not have made for a satisfactory connection in any event.

Were there matters of substance that those not present could usefully follow up?

--Wendy

contributed by guest@socialtext.net on 2007-04-11 17:42:35 GMT