[Membership] The People's Republic of ICANN?

[Joop Teernstra <terastra@terabytz.co.nz>]

At 21:42 3/02/99 -0500, Diane Cabell wrote:
>The consensus is that the At Large membership should extend beyond the
category
>of domain holders.  There are many individuals and organizations that are
>impacted by names and numbers policies (and the implementation of
protocols) who
>do not have domain names.  Personnel who work in the Internet industry, mail
>users, people who have websites on hosted domains, etc.
>
Diane and all,

With all due respect: whose consensus ?
I recall the requirement for the MAC members to be ready to work in a
fishbowl environment of transparency.
Apart from your own postings, there has been very little evidence of other
MAC members involving themselves in the debate and providing argument for
or against a "people's Jamahiriya".
If I can hear good argument, maybe I can be convinced. 

Now we hear about consensus.

Could we please hear from each MAC member how he/she voted on this issue
and why?
If "personnel" working in the Internet industry are now also to be
considered affected, how far is ICANN's  arm going to reach?  
Together with the hiring of  Ogylvy as  Public Relations consultant, it
looks like an attempt to dilute the only group of stakeholders that would
*really* be interested to have representatives on the Board.

>Although a limited membership as you propose has not been ruled out, there
does
>not seem to be much support on the MAC for it at the present time.  You are
>absolutely right, however, that it would be much easier to administer.
>

Not only that, a new democracy stands a better chance of succeeding if it
is applied in smaller steps.
Once you have a fully functioning and well administered democracy of domain
name holders , with a proper representation of those millions of real
stakeholders, *then* you can take the next step and expand the democracy to
"all users".
IMHO, to try to implement an "all users" democracy all at once almost
guarantees it to be degraded to a sham.













--Joop--
http://www.democracy.org.nz/model.html