Dear all,

I am pleased to announce the result of the 2023 elections for the leadership of the EURALO Individual Members Association.

Ricardo Holmquist has been elected Chair of the Association. He will be the official representative of the Association and the voting member in EURALO, replacing Roberto Gaetano.

The following members have been elected to the Board of the Association:

• Amali De Silva – Mitchell
• Roberto Gaetano
• Mouloud Khelif
• Fotjon Kosta
• Liubomir Nikiforov

I am stepping down as Chair, but will remain in the Board to facilitate the transition.

Let me take this opportunity to thank the former Board members for their services, and the incoming leaders for accepting the task to lead this organization to new success and increased support to the At-Large community.

Best regards,

Roberto

Dear Members,

The election process is now open.

We are looking for candidates for the following positions in our Association:

• Chairperson
• five Board members

Please find here the description for these position and other relevant information.

All members who have compiled an SOI are eligible for any of the above positions. In order to declare your interest to be a candidate please send an email to the mailing list euroindividuals@googlegroups.com by Wednesday 22 February at 23:59 UTC.

Best regards,

Roberto

Dear Members,

I would like to share some considerations about the status of the Association.

First of all, the numbers: as you can see on our web site https://individualusers.org/our-members-community/ we have 79 members and 5 observers. These numbers are by far the highest across RALOs.

Besides the numbers, we should note that among our members we have people that are very active in the ICANN community, and also people in leadership positions, including ICANN Board and PTI Board.

So we can say that our Association, thanks to our members, is playing an important role in the ICANN community, and in particular for the At-Large. But we must ask ourselves one question: what does our Association for favouring and supporting the participation of our members? In short, are we providing an added value to the sum of individualities of our members?

My personal answer is no. I would love to be proven wrong, but there is not much that we add, as organization, to the achievement of our members, with the possible exception of the simple fact that we provide a “home” for them that they may not find in other parts of the ICANN community.

The follow up question is whether we should provide more – or whether what we do is just what is expected from us. Corollary question is whether our members had expectations that were not fulfilled by joining our association. In other words, is there something that we should do, or at least do better, in order to provide an added value?

Once we have an answer to the questions above, we will be better placed to figure out the implications for our current way to operate. For instance, what role and purpose has the web site? What should be the content of it, in order to make it an useful tool rather that being just a repository – and not even timely updated – for information about our Association? Actually, do we really need to have a web site or will this be a wasted effort? Also our internal mailing list does not seem to be very active. With the requirement of having all EURALO Individual Members subscribed to the public EURALO discuss list euro-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org do we still need a list for our members? I personally believe we still do, but would like to hear the opinion of the members. And there are even more questions that we should ask ourselves – but first of all we must understand the role that we have as an association for individual members.

I believe that time is ripe for a change. Since the early days in which our founding members started this initiative much has changed. For instance, the need for having individual members to provide additional resources for achieving the At-Large goals has been recognised. A working party has been tasked to formulate recommendations to formalise participation of individual users and to mobilise more resources from the user community worldwide. The UIM-WP – see https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/Unaffiliated+Individuals+Mobilization+Working+Party – has produced these recommendations, approved by ALAC in March 2021. We are still struggling to having them implemented, but besides formal implementation I believe that this is the time for rethinking our structure – so our 2022 General Assembly is happening at the right moment.

I will send in a separate message a reminder of the requirements for RALO Individual Members – this is the formal title that is given to individual users – but can anticipate that there is nothing that would sound “strange”. All requirements are what could be reasonably expected. However, it is good to have a wide discussion so that there is a full understanding of the new rules.

Cheers,
Roberto

It is my pleasure to announce that two members of our Association have been appointed to ICANN Leadership positions.

Please join me in congratulating Danko Jevtović, who has been elected Vice-Chair of the ICANN Board, and Tobias Sattler, who has been selected by NomCom for the PTI Board.

Roberto

Dear Members,

In the past years we have seen a huge growth in the membership, as of today we have 78 members and 5 observers – see https://individualusers.org/our-members-community/.

However, while a lot of our members are active in the ICANN community, there is little added value that our association brings. Initially, the idea was to use our communication tools (blog, email, etc.) to share information and discuss ideas – time has shown that the communication and discussion happens using different vehicles, like for instance the Discussion for At-Large Europe euro-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org mailing list.

In the meantime, the Unaffiliated Individual Members Working Party (UIM-WP) has provided recommendations, approved by ALAC, to make more efficient use of the limited resources and to better mobilise the individual members that we have in each RALO. Some of the recommendations include:

• formalise the application process giving an active role to At-Large Staff
• define minimum requirements for RALO Individual Members
• define obligations for RALO Individual Members

The rules of our association are by and large aligned with these recommendations, but we need to discuss the situation and formally do some changes. I am planning to use F2F time at ICANN75 to trim the details and call for a General Meeting of the Association as part of the EURALO 2022 Days, scheduled for 8-10 November 2022.

I will circulate a bullet point list of the items to be addressed to comply with the ALAC approved recommendations and we can discuss different options, as the recommendations leave margins for implementations by different RALOs.

I am also publishing this message in our blog.

Best regards,

Roberto

EuroDIG – The Hague – 19 June 2019

The meeting opened at 12:45 local time – 10:45 UTC.

The Chair invited the attendees to introduce themselves. There were also several observers. No remote attendees.

The Chair briefly summarised the status of the Association, addressing the following points:

• in the last elections of the board we had only three candidates for five seats – Roberto, Dina, and Fotjon were elected;
• the Association now counts 50 members and 6 observers, with one applicant in the approval process.

No question or comments were made

The Chair presented a few proposals for the next year, that are:

• to have more flexible procedures, less decisions by the Board and more interaction with the membership;
• improve outreach, using all opportunities to present the Association to potentially new members interested in participating to the ICANN processes – events at which outreach can be successful include IGF (global, regional and national) – need for presentation materials, including flyers.

Olivier, EURALO Chair, took the floor. He said that his mandate will end at the ICANN meeting in Montreal. He then focused on funding part and mentioned that we are not always optimising the use of CROP, and some time we miss opportunities. One way to improve is to share CROP information on all mailing lists and make sure that the EURALO event calendar is always up-to-date.

Matthias stated that we should provide better information on how to subscribe to mailing lists and proposes to have this accessible on our web site.

A discussion took place on Universal Acceptance. It was clarified that the issue is not only related to IDN, although those represent the most visible example. It was argued that Internet Users, and therefore also our Association, can play a fundamental role detecting and reporting the cases in which valid addresses are not accepted by some operators. This is something that our members could commit doing.

Olivier reports that EURALO has 36 ALSes, but added that more important than the total numbers is the number of active members.

The Chair summarised the discussion and added the following:

• we definitively need to redesign the web site, but this requires resources;
• people interested in Universal Acceptance should subscribe to the ALAC IDN WG, that under the chairmanship of Satish Babu is currently extending its scope to cover multilingualism and UA;
• we need more volunteers for different tasks in our association, for instance as website management, maybe a call for volunteers should be made.

The Chair closed the meeting at 14:00 local time – 12:00 UTC – mentioning the upcoming meeting in Marrakesh and the possibility to meet some of our members there.

The EURALO Individual Users Association has held its AGM in Barcelona in the margins of the ICANN meeting #63 on Sunday, 21 October, at 12:15 local time (10:15 UTC).

Please find below the pointer to the recording of the meeting.

http://ftp.adigo.com/clients/icann/20181021_EURALO_Individual_Users_Association.zip [ftp.adigo.com]

The Board of your Association is pleased to welcome its fifth member, Dina Solveig Jalkanen, whose candidacy and election were recorded in the report of the Board meeting held on 3 September 2018.

Dina is involved in many aspects of the Internet: accessibility, digital rights, security vulnerabilities, and more. Her experience in ICANN includes volunteer work in NCUC (Non-Commercial Users Constituency) and NPOC (Not-for-Profit Operational Concerns Constituency). She is currently the representative of Electronic Frontier Finland in NPOC.

Dina’s bio can be viewed here on ICANNwiki.

PANAMA CITY – 25 June 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is honored to announce the recipient of the 2018 Multistakeholder Ethos Award. This year, the community selection panel posthumously recognized a long-time member of the ICANN community: Stéphane Van Gelder. The award was presented today at ICANN62 in Panama City to Stéphane Van Gelder’s wife Julie Talfournier Van Gelder.

Please find the complete article here.