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I recently attended Rome meeting – sorry to say. I had to leave Wednesday morning due to a commitment in the U.S. I have given considerable thought to how the At Large should organize itself, and how it should attract members.
Individuals (at least in the societies I am directly familiar with) largely depend on governments to represent them in matters which are: 1) either not of direct concern to them or 2) which they do not fully grasp (e.g., like internet technical issues). They sometimes become members of groups that represent them (e.g. lobbing groups, etc.) to the government. The Internet is a new phenomenon that individuals do not understand and has historically been run by very technical people, government, or those with large commercial interests. The trick for At Large is to develop an appeal to individuals so they have an incentive to get involved. Most people probably do not care about new TLDs, and IDNs, and feel like intellectual property issues will be handled in the courts. I have the following question for ALAC:
1) Does At Large want to have individual members, or organizations that represent individuals, or both? This is crucial. It will drive the type of organization we want to become. 2) How can At Large have the greatest policy impact on ICANN related issues? With Individual Members? Organizational Members? 3) How do we get people interested in policy issues? They are usually only of concern to those that have a direct stake in them. 4) How do we educate the populous about the issues and motivate them to be involved? 5) How do we convince organizations (which represent individually) to invest their scare resources in ICANN activities? How do we motivate them? 6) Do we want to represent all individual internet users (probably impossible) , “power users,” users that are part of organizations the represent individuals (a very select group I assume), or just technical users who have no representation somewhere else?
Many issues and question come of out answering the questions above. I offer to help work toward these answers but unless we answer these fundamental questions, I am not sure how we can proceed and hope to be successful.
Dr Michael Gendron
Michael Gendron, Ph.D. Associate Professor of MIS Central Connecticut State University 860-832-3293 gendronm@xxxxxxxx
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