No rewards for doing wrong.

[Michael Sondow <msondow@iciiu.org>]

Dear members of the ICANN interim Board;

It is well known and universally accepted that in the educational
development of individuals, wrong or mistaken actions should not be
reinforced by rewarding the wrong-doers or by allowing them to
benefit from those actions, and it is the same with incipient
organizations. Yet this is what the ICANN Board would be doing if it
allowed the groups organizing DNSO constituencies to elect
representatives to the Names Council before the nature of
constituency's membership is confirmed.

How can candidates for NC seats be nominated and a meaningful
election held when neither the field for selecting candidates nor
the full electorate has been defined and included in these crucial
activities? Those determinations cannot be made until a definition
of the constituency is decided upon, which in turn cannot be done
until the Board has had the chance to see all the proposals, compare
them, comment on them, and either effect a rapprochement between the
various organizing groups or select that which has submitted the
best proposal and empower it to conduct elections.

You have requested that organizing entites submit proposals for
constituency guidelines before the Berlin meeting; but the nature of
the organizing entites and thus the nature of their proposals will
change with the adherence of new members if it is an open process,
and this process has only just begun and will not be completed even
in Berlin, though hopefully the Berlin meeting will provide an
opportunity for consolidation of it. Therefore, while you can
advance the organizational efforts of the organizing groups, and
yourselves get an idea of what the proposals to be made in Berlin
will be, you cannot justifiably sanction a unilaterally held
election for names Council seats by any group at this time. And any
group which attempts to conduct such an ill-timed election must be
doing so out of ignorance of the efforts of others, a perhaps
natural consequence of self-organization and the lack of any central
point of communication for the process, or from a reprehensible
desire to gain the upper hand over other legitimate members of the
constituency by presenting elected NC members in Berlin as a fait
accompli.

I ask you, then, to discourage as much as it is in your power to do
so the premature nomination of candidates to NC seats and their
election by an incomplete membership, and to inform the organizers
of the constituencies that such ill-advised procedures, which are
not in accordance with the transparency and openness requirements of
the DNSO and ICANN, will not be tolerated.

Yours,
Michael Sondow, for the ICIIU

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International Congress of Independent Internet Users (ICIIU) 
        http://www.iciiu.org       iciiu@iciiu.org 
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