ALAC Representatives Report Jan 2008

This report will cover the December 2007 & the January 2008 Activities of the APRALO ALAC Representatives. (as the Dec APRALO Meeting did not have a quorum and therefore no report was presented)

Since the Los Angeles ICANN Meeting, the inclusion of the RALO Secretatriats into the internal ALAC email list, has in our opinion allowed for greater transparancy of ALAC activities, but we still see limited input and activity from some RALO's via this mechanism. General ALAC activity and processes have been conducted on this and the Public At-Large List, with considerable input from the APRALAO ALAC representatives, mainly in the capacity of roles held within ALAC rather than specifically on behalf of APRALO, but APRALO specific views and opinions have been made, at the November, December and January ALAC Meetings (please see Minutes Actions arrising and transcripts of thes held in the ALAC Meeting section of the Wiki)and in particular to policy devcelopment processes in the matters of Domain Tasting. the New Delhi ICANN Meeting planning and logistics, POriposed At-Large Summit planning for the ICANN Meeting in Paris in June, Fast Track IDN's (with the two ALAC representatives on the IDNC-WG being from our RALO), as well as IDN's in ccTLDs and preliminary input only, into the NTIA review.

The considerable work of members of APRALO in sessions and activities in the RIO IGF will no doubt be reported on seperatly, by those involved, but should also be noted here and is listed in detail on the relevant associated web pages for these activities.

The ALAC ExCo now meets every alternat fortnight to the monthly ALAC meeting, and APRALO issues casn be raised at these meetings as well as via the traditional channels. At thge first of these a plan for greater input into policy developmnent work flow was agreed to and integrates a higher level of input (and responsability) to the RALO's including their invoovement in all ALAC Working Groups... the text is included below, for your ease of refference... and we should conduct some further discussion on these matters (if time permits) at todays meeting, and will be discussed at length in New Delhi.

Structured work flow
ALAC shall work as the board works, dividing tasks among its members, to guarantee some results. Looks impossible to achieve results working all the time with a enormous amount of emails and a large number of the people as in an assembly.
May proposal is the following:
The liaisons with other constituencies or working groups shall be the "chair" of a committee related to that specific constituency/WG the liaison is working for.
These committees will have defined and clear tasks, including propose statements to public forum, raises new issues to be presented at specific forum, changes
To populate the committees the any fellow from at large community may participate, but would be good to have one of each Ralo, but this can not be mandatory, since depend upon the skill and the interest of each fellow.
Each committee shall have 5 or less persons to allow an objective debate and quick results.
Each committee shall have its own email closed list. (and a sub wiki page)
Committees will send their statements or proposals to the ALAC board that shall have no more than 1 week to make suggestion and post the statement/proposal.
If it is a statement we shall post at public comment page, if it is a proposal it will be posted at ALAC page to allow public comment.

RALO relationship.
We need to have a specific meeting agenda to each RALO members with some periodicity. To make it more useful I believe we could use ourselves from the board, as the responsible to talk with the regional RALO we belong.
This could be arranged with more facility than have a world wide teleconference. And will work better – less people, n
We need to set up a common agenda , each regional group meet and then post the summary of the meeting at our wiki - comments are open and RALOs can get positions, propose issues from these conclusions and we will have the issues flowing thru.

Day by day activity
We, as a group, need learn to work using the wiki, avoiding the excess of emails that just pollute the debate instead of add value to it. Teleconferences were bad at board and are not better at ALAC. We need to find out another better and may be cheap way to get together. Lest try skype or other tools. I know connection in some places are also bad, but we could also call by phone using skype or other tool. As a board we have tried different telecom operators but depend upon where people was, the connection became awfull. This is one issue we need to work with staff to try a solution!
New issues
Create a temporary working group, with a formal task and time to produce a result, working at the same way the committees, but more open to participants.