What we have here is a failure to communicate... It's really disappointing that civil society actors in ICANN seem to be dug into a permanent circular firing squad. Like other readers of this blog I've participated in a lot of CS coalitions around national and global ICT policy, and I have never seen anything like this elsewhere. Nobody benefits from this, other than the commercial interests and related forces for whom effective public interest advocacy is an unwelcome disruption. As a participant in both NCUC (on the GNSO Council since 11/08) and ALAC (on the EURALO board since 5/07) I'd like to believe that the two sides can not only co-exist but collaborate extensively. Each should be able to play its unique role on planet ICANN without stepping on the other's toes, and indeed on many substantive ICANN issues there is often significant agreement between their respective memberships (which in fact overlap a fair amount, I'm hardly alone). But there seems to be a lot of long-standing interpersonal boogie joogie among some key people on both sides mixed with faux turf and other considerations, and there are no functioning channels of communication to help dispel misperceptions and suspicions. For my part, I offered almost a month ago to serve as a liaison but never got a reply from ALAC, and am now told that they've decided they don't need to liaise with NCUC. And to my knowledge there's no NCUC-ALAC meeting planned for Seoul. Hard to see how this is going to go anywhere but downhill from here, but whatever, I guess. FWIW, I understand Milton's thinking in this post, and share much of it, but I wouldn't have put things in the same manner. The title of the piece and some of the text personalizes the differences and seems guaranteed to insult, so the responses from CLO, Evan and Adam fix on this aspect and hence don't address the core institutional issues at stake. I'd suggest putting the interpersonal stuff aside and focusing on substance. I think NCUC is right to argue that the SIC/staff charter that was overwhelmingly rejected both by NCUC members and a good many independent civil society supporters during the public comment period is poorly designed and likely to reproduce ad nauseum precisely the sort of fragmentation and dysfunctionality we're seeing here; and that, per Milton's point 3, approving new constituencies now probably would have the effect of locking in that charter as a fait accompli. Hence, in an 18 August letter http://www.icann.org/correspondence/ncuc-to-beckstrom-18aug09-en.pdf NCUC asked that the board to 1) meet with us in Seoul; 2) agree to work with us to arrive at a final charter all can live with, and in this context to give full consideration to the NCUC-proposed charter alongside the SIC/staff charter; and 3) refrain from locking in new constituencies until fundamental structural issues involving the relationship between constituencies and stakeholder groups have been resolved. The position outlined in the letter is pretty reasonable, given all that's transpired around the charters. Unfortunately, the letter is perhaps a bit confusing on the time frame. We asked that the board review the transitional charter "within one year" (p.1) or "over the next year" (p.4), but of course, we would prefer to do it as soon as possible if the board were willing. Given that, as Adam points out, ALAC voted to support creation of a consumer constituency in April, it is therefore unfortunate that this has been sort of processed by many as meaning NCUC wants no constituencies before July 2010, and it doesn't help that Milton argues in his first paragraph that "the Board must wait until next year before even considering" a consumer constituency. It would have been great if ALAC could have supported NCUC's call for collaboration with the board to resolve the charter issues (on which some ALACers agree with NCUC and some don't) to their mutual satisfaction, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, with any ready-to-go constituencies to be launched soon thereafter. Instead, what we have is a move ("orchestrated" isn't a slur) in the RALOs to denounce the NCUC's call for a delay, which I guess they read as for one year. And while his word choice was over-heated, I didn't actually see Milton saying, as Evan alleges, that the RALOs "have been bullied, coerced or otherwise manipulated." But it's a fair bet that many members are not fully aware of NCUC's thinking, either. I have a EURALO call in a few hours and expect we'll be dealing with all this, sigh... Finally, while he's blurred them together in this post, the merits of the consumer constituency proposal are entirely separate from the charter-related issues I've just mentioned. Personally, I share Milton's concerns in point 4 above the practicality and effects of separating "consumer" issues from others noncom people care about like privacy and freedom of speech, and would have appreciated a probing dialogue on the best way to advance such issues in the NCSG. On the other hand, I'm also open minded, and if in fact there's an internationally diverse and representative group that can make a strong analytical and operational case for such a constituency, fine. This hasn't been obvious to me, but then there's been little effective communication between NCUC and ALAC on this and other matters. A sad state of affairs all around… Bill