Procedures/Individual/organizations membership at NCSG

[Sam Lanfranco]

Dear NCSG Colleagues,

For private reasons I have been less involved in NCSG/NPOC for 2018. I 
have kept abreast of issues and have long been concerned with those 
surrounding organizational and individual membership. I would like to 
comment here from several slightly different perspectives.

First, while we come from the non-commercial constituencies, we address 
the concerns of the non-commercial constituencies. We do not represent 
the non-commercial constituency stakeholder group nor are we in any 
formal way accountable to it. We simply do our best.

Organizational members may represent the interests and concerns of their 
organization, then again maybe not. Let me be personal here. When asked 
to join NPOC and NCSG I had recently served as Chair of the Board for 
Canadian global health ngo CSIH. This was early in the ongoing 
discussions around the Red Cross domain name issue and concerns about 
health relate gTLDs.

After a couple of years my NGO effectively untethered me, leaving me to 
maintain a watching brief and reporting back on issues that may concern 
them. The rest of the time I could simple engage in addressing the 
concerns of the non-commercial constituency. My ngo views its membership 
as part of its “good works”. I simply do my best and only report back 
when a relevant issue emerges. I do not speak on behalf of my 
organizational member.

It would be interesting to know how many organizational members have a 
formal obligation to report back to their organization, and how many 
pre-clear their positions on, and participation in, ICANN policy 
matters. When that is not the case, being also an individual member with 
the associated extra votes raises troubling questions. That is why, 
although I could, I have not applied for individual membership.

To cut this short, most of the serious ICANN work is done among us on a 
consensus basis. What is important is the dialogue, the knowledge 
sharing, and how hard working members produce useful outputs. Voting is 
mainly for selecting among ourselves those willing to put in even more 
work in essentially administrative leadership positions. Those we elect 
do not have extraordinary powers, they have extra duties. Voting is not 
about resolving policy or implementation issues.

This leaves me to wonder why we do not simply have one membership, and 
one vote, per member. Even the large organization small organization 
distinction makes little sense. We, individually or representing the 
express positions of our organizations, bring evidence, logic, and 
context to bear when deliberating policy and implementation issues. Hard 
fought battles still end in consensus. They do not end because the vote 
was 51:49 and “ever vote counts”. What is important is the integrity of 
the process and the quality of the consensual outputs. The scale and 
scope of membership and voting rights should reflect this. As they stand 
they address things that are really a non-issue here.

While I don't expect this to happen in the short run, I would support 
simplifying participation to one membership and one vote, and returning 
our energies to producing ICANN deliverables.

Sam L., NPOC



-- 
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"It is a disgrace to be rich and honoured
in an unjust state" -Confucius
  邦有道，贫且贱焉，耻也。邦无道，富且贵焉，耻也
------------------------------------------------
Visiting Prof, Xi'an Jaiotong-Liverpool Univ, Suzhou, China
Dr Sam Lanfranco (Prof Emeritus), Econ, York U., CANADA
email: Lanfran at Yorku.ca   Skype: slanfranco
blog:  https://samlanfranco.blogspot.com
Phone: +1 613-476-0429 cell: +1 416-816-2852

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