[CPWG] Mission creep (was Re: Geographical Names and ISO 4217 alpha3 currency codes [...])

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Mon, 24 Jun 2019 at 09:04, <h.raiche at internode.on.net> wrote:

> I also concur
>

Thanks to all for the support of this position.

As I get older, most of my thought processes these days start with "life's
too short to dwell over the irrelevant". I didn't intentionally mean to
pick on Christopher's issue to make this stand.

In the past, ALAC has indulged in this kind of mission-creep far too often
and I confess to having been a part of that. We got way too deep into
issues such as vertical integration, dot-brands and similar battles that
have near-zero impact on end-users. In hindsight, I even think that the
massive amount of work that ALAC did in promoting (new-gTLD) Applicant
support -- an effort that I co-chaired -- was for the benefit of would-be
registries and indirectly registrars, with little fallout beyond them.

*It wasn't an Alt-Large issue.*

I can bemoan the execution of the Applicant Support program but must now
realize in hindsight that its failure really did not impact end-users one
bit. Even had it succeeded, registrants would have benefited but the
end-user impact would be negligible. Given the massive amount of
person-hours spent on the program by myself, Avri, Tijani, Alice (from the
GAC) and many others, this realization is disheartening. Others should
learn from our errors and be encouraged to avoid similar paths of futile
irrelevance.

As my penance I will do what I can going forward to repeat the
end-user-relevance litmus test applied on currency-code TLDs to other ALAC
issues and requests for comments, as they come forward. I invite others to
be similarly vigilant.

At one time I recall that At-Large staff measured the success and
effectiveness of ALAC by how many statements and comments it produced. That
approach of measuring quantity rather than quality, in retrospect, was an
awful mistake, and must be repudiated should it still exist(*). Let's be
super selective in the topics of interest -- issues of trust, abuse, IDNs,
access and safety, for example -- but do justice to them once identified.

Cheers,
Evan

(*) Yet one more instance of the many ways in which At-Large-related
metrics are awful and an impediment to our real effectiveness. The only
metric that really matters is "how is ICANN better because we are here?"
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