icann's at large advisory committee, which i chair, has finally announced the appointment of two new members, to replace thomas roessler (now at w3c) and esther dyson; and also the appointment of bret fausett as gnso liaison.

the two new members are new faces for icann - john levine and annette muehlberg. john is the author of "the internet for dummies", one of the most famous internet guides, and board member of cauce, the anti-spam coalition. annette is a well known activist in german civil society, especially in the offline world, working for a trade union and in frankfurt's city council.

and of course everyone at icann knows bret - he's a long time icann participant and maintains one of the most reliable information sources about icann, online law and internet governance, his blog.

personally, i am really happy with the appointments that were made, even if we had plenty of good candidates, ranging from newcomers with impressive curriculums to long-time at large activists. we even received an application by danny younger, the former general assembly chair who is now calling for the disbandment of the entire committee...

it's always hard to mix and satisfy people from the broad variety of user groups that exist - not just at icann, but also at the wsis. thus, inside civil society there is a latent but visible contraposition between the internet-age, grassroots, informal online groups and individuals (as those who have been participating at icann in the last 8 years) and people from bigger, traditional ngos (as most of those who attend wsis) .

internet people such as danny are ready to complain loud if you don't provide them with a real-time irc interface to your meetings and a skype connection to dial up and participate, and any process taking more than two months to conclude and not being punctuated with shouting matches and harsh public statements is easily considered to be shallow and pointless - if not a bad-faith fig leaf exercise (online people love plots).

traditional "offline" ngos - a world which i'm just starting to get in touch with - have been spending years participating in formal processes among governments or at the united nations, so they are often used to printed agendas, motions of order and draft deliberations published well in advance; they sometimes feel excluded as they cannot grasp the technicalities and cope with the speed at which internet things evolve.

making these two worlds shake hands is difficult. traditional civil society activism is now starting to make use of blogs, digital cameras and online interactions. internet people like myself have started to understand that just by shouting, flaming on mailing lists, starting up mass email campaigns and getting a thousand people sign up on a random website you rarely get anywhere. still, we will need a lot of good will and reciprocal understanding just to learn how to work together. and then, we'll still have to convince the rest of the world...