Here at the ICANN meeting, there are vendors and interest groups - you can get "O" caps from overstock.com, water bottles, and the like. Although swag is given away it is paid for, it is not free of cost
Vendors and advocates absorb that cost.
But there are others who are inappropriately putting that cost onto the community of internet users: ICANN's Ombudsman is giving out ICANN luggage tags! Wow, I can only wonder at the mentality that felt that ICANN's money should be wasted this way. In this same room only a short time ago we heard ICANN's financial report in which the point was made once again that ICANN's financial needs always exceed its revenues.
I'm sitting here listening to ICANN's ombudsman who is self-justifying his nearly absolute disengagement from deeply entrenched and long-lived ICANN's procedural failures. I was amused to hear him recite, without attribution, something I had previously said to him in an email.
ICANN sold us the ombudsman as a partial compensation for ICANN's evisceration of the public voice within ICANN. It is very sad that ICANN's ombudsman has cast his role in the small, so small that it can be represented by a throw-away luggage tag. It is sadder still that ICANN's board goes along yet another broken promise.
Update: It's not luggage tags, it's keychain fobs.
Posted by karl at December 3, 2005 11:23 AM