[Membership] Re:, Membership] Staff report section IV. Creating the At Large Membership

[Angelo Gonzalez <agonzalez@empresas-galicia.com>]

Response to Tom Lowenhaupt comments:

Tom,

I agree that contacting the additional groups you suggest, in the
effort to form the At-Large membership,  could be helpful. However, 
I do disagree, strongly, with your appreciation of the  Internet-
related organizations as being too narrow.

Before giving my reasons,  I want to point out that the staff 
recommendations regarding membership criteria are:

    - A commitment to participate,
    - Having an Internet electronic mail address,
    - Having  a postal mail address,
    - Verifiable citizenship and residency
      (I would add here: for the country of the postal address).
    - Ability to support the costs of ICANN At Large membership
      when a cost recovery mechanism is identified and approved.

To these requirements, it should be added that the membership
as a whole should be diverse and globally balanced.

Given these requirements, I can asure you that there is only one
organization where you can find the largest and most diverse
group of people meeting all of them. This organization is the
ISOC and its chapters. Some data about ISOC members:

     - They live in all parts of  the world (about 10.000 of them).
     - They are commited to an Internet-for-all.
     - They are commited to procure a harmonic evolution of
        the Net.
     - They belong to all kinds of professions. In our chapter, in
        Galicia, Spain, our members are not only engineers, we
        have medical doctors, lawyers, politicians, bank employees,
        school teachers, etc. all of them with a genuine interest on
        matters related to the Net. And of course, among those
        people there are: just users,  DNS name holders and also
        ISPs. In my meetings with members of other European
        countries I found that the members of their chapters, have
        a similar mixing in their membership.

Now, some comments about the organizations you suggest:

 -  NSI and Registrars lists are made mostly of name holders and
    as a group they are well represented by the DNSO. Since the
    Registrars are starting to function, the bulk of these peple will
    come mostly from the NSI data base. From my point of view
    that would not give us a global or diversity balance in the mem-
    bership (a sudden influx of millions of name holders is too much).

-   ICANN financial sponsors are few at this time, and mostly located
    in the US.

-   Contacting consumer groups all over the world may not be an easy
    task.

I have been a member of the IEEE and ACM in the past. Contacting
those would also help and should be added to your list. These 
organizations are not fully Internet-related though there are 
Internet-related-Special-Interest-Groups in their membership.

But again, I think that ISOC is the best place to go for an initial
membership that meets the staff recommendations. In fact, I bet that
some of the people in the chapters may be willing to take care of
the associated administrative task of setting up this membership.
In our chapter here in Galicia, Spain, we have some people willing
to do that. I should also point out that the ISOC chapter is the 
only non-profit Internet-related organization in our autonomous
region.

Regards,

                            Angelo Gonzalez
                            Member of ISOC (Galicia, Spain)

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Angelo Gonzalez
(Member of ISOC-GALicia, Spain).

c\México 39, Ofic. 7
36204 Vigo, Spain
Tl. 986-418893
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