[CCWG-ACCT] Communications Ideas

Mon Sep 28 19:18:23 UTC 2015

This is solid advice. Everyone should read this and take it onboard.
Thank you for this one Kieren.

_james

From: <accountability-cross-community-bounces at icann.org<mailto:accountability-cross-community-bounces at icann.org>> on behalf of Kieren McCarthy
Date: Monday 28 September 2015 20:06
To: Dr Eberhard W Lisse
Cc: Lisse Eberhard, CCWG Accountability
Subject: Re: [CCWG-ACCT] Communications Ideas

To get back to the initial theme of this email thread: communications.

Yes, the CCWG report as it currently stands is severely lacking in clear communications.

I doubt that clear communications will resolve the current impasse but I have yet to see a single situation where clear communications has not helped.

Here is my advice to this group, based on having been a comms professional for 20 years.

1. Keep your report. It is how this group works. Trying to bend it into clear communications for the rest of the world will be a tiring and pointless task.

2. Write a second report specifically designed for non-ICANNers to read. Think: Congressmen, your own senior VPs whose eyes rollover whenever you mention the word "ICANN". Smart people who couldn't care less about ICANN but do want to be up-to-date and informed about important developments.

3. Create a sub-group of people who actually write those kinds of reports for a living to produce the second report.

4. Here is what is missing in what the CCWG is currently proposing:

* This is no clear rationale for why these changes are needed
* There is no clear explanation for why these solutions were chosen
* There is no clear explanation for what happens if these things aren't done

5. Here are the components of the current CCWG plans that undermine it:

* It is both too vague and too detailed
* Too vague: the overall scaffolding is not explained sufficiently or clearly.
* Too detailed: no one but not one outside the 50 GNSO obsessives in this world want anything to do with obscure voting procedures that they will never participate in. And no one but no one wants to read pages about the process you followed except in the most enormously general terms.

* It is too complex
* If you want the internet community to override the Board, then it needs to be clear to people outside ICANN how that works. Just imagine a completely different organization.

Imagine you are reading a report about how the car industry is allowed to overrule the international body that regulates emissions. If you are faced with a dozen pages over how a specific subgroup of the car industry, under a weighted voting system, is able to overrule a decision not withstanding a challenge from a specific group of plant union workers who would then be expected to enter an as-yet unspecified arbitration process whose final result would require a separate process, also under weighted voting, that would reconsider the results of the report and decides whether to empower a new group....

You see that and you say: this is a mess and won't ever work.

But if you read: an override would require all groups from the manufacturers to the dealers to the pant worker union to agree... well then you can have some confidence in it.

The shorter version of this point is: the GNSO needs to pull its head out its ass.

Now to get to the nub of it:

There are several very, very good reasons why there should be a "member" of ICANN. Focus on them (at least in the second, clear comms, report).

Two of the biggest I would say are:

* Without a member, the internet community will never be able to legally separate IANA from ICANN. That is the one, single, unquestionable power that the NTIA currently has: to cut that contract. Under the Board's MEM plan, that unquestionable right does not and will not exist.

* Without a member, the Board can pass a two-thirds resolution to move its headquarters to Beijing and there is nothing the rest of the internet community can do about it. The Board's MEM approach is so convoluted that it could be tied up in pseudo-legislation for the next decade. The member approach provides a legal, unassailable right to reject that and at the same time kick the Board off for good measure.

These are clear scenarios that would currently never happen because the NTIA is in charge. When the NTIA is gone, they have to become impossible. And the member model is the clear path, written into existing US corporate law i.e. not some special hodge-podge of ideas dreamed up in the penthouse suite of an LA hotel.

Tell that to Congress and then let ICANN Corporate explain why their approach is better.

* Last suggestion: stop calling it the "single member model". Call it something that makes immediate sense to everyone and has a positive feel to it. That way people can understand it. And you give the Board a way to save face.

Hope this is helpful.

Kieren

On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Dr Eberhard W Lisse <el at lisse.na<mailto:el at lisse.na>> wrote:
Paul,

to be precise, categoric and emphatic, we want the reasons (WHY).

We have seen shared the understanding of WHAT the Board is saying.

And apparently we need to find out how to ask the Board, because they seem to have issues with it.

el

--
Sent from Dr Lisse's iPad mini

On 27 Sep 2015, at 15:15, Paul Rosenzweig <paul.rosenzweig at redbranchconsulting.com<mailto:paul.rosenzweig at redbranchconsulting.com>> wrote:

Yes oracle of Delphi.  What is the Board view?  Nobody asked you say.    We are asking now?

--
Paul
Sent from myMail app for Android

Sunday, 27 September 2015, 06:09PM -04:00 from Dr Eberhard W Lisse <epilisse at gmail.com<mailto:epilisse at gmail.com>>:

Than what is it, what you are stating?

el

--
Sent from Dr Lisse's iPad mini

On 27 Sep 2015, at 14:14, Chris Disspain <ceo at auda.org.au<https://e-aj.my.com/compose/?mailto=mailto%3aceo@auda.org.au>> wrote:

No El, that is emphatically, categorically and precisely not what I am stating.

Cheers,

Chris

On 28 Sep 2015, at 07:06 , Dr Eberhard W Lisse <epilisse at gmail.com<https://e-aj.my.com/compose/?mailto=mailto%3aepilisse@gmail.com>> wrote:

Chris,

are you seriously stating that the Board does not have to give reasons because it was unaware we would like to unserstand why, or are are saying "You gotta ask me nicely"? (Jack Nicholson as Col Jessup in "A few good men")

greetings, el

--
Sent from Dr Lisse's iPhone 5s

On 27 Sep 2015, 13:31 -0700, Chris Disspain <ceo at auda.org.au<https://e-aj.my.com/compose/?mailto=mailto%3aceo@auda.org.au>>, wrote:
[...]

But you did not ask the Board to expand on its comments or explain why it had a problem with anything in the CCWG report.

Cheers,

Chris

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