[Chapter-delegates] Fwd: Urgent: Signature of the updated ISOC Chapter Charter Letter

[Alan Levin]

Dear friends and colleagues,

It seems that your top-down model is taking over (I say "yours" since I am
told over 110 of you have signed this agreement).   ISOC-ZA have agreed not
to relinquish the name Internet Society to the benevolent dictator in the
USA, i.e. we believe we own this name in our Geography. So - as discussed
always - we have taken out the part that says "The Internet Society hereby
grants the Chapter a limited, revocable, non-exclusive license to use the
name “Internet Society”.  We also reserve the right to be called the
Internet Society of South Africa as we have in the past, and not how ISOC
may determine from time to time how we should be named (as per the same
part of the agreement we are being "forced" to sign).

i.e. we established ourselves independently as a Chapter in our Geography
and in 1998 that allowed us sovereignty and ownership of the name Internet
Society. Since then we have established ourselves as a local civil society
organisation that has mostly focused on local policy making activities
relating to the Internet.

Unfortunately now the "mother ship" has told us that we must relinquish our
name to them and accept that we use it only under their license. Since we
do not agree they wish to fight us / exclude us / or as they state "put us
into "rehabilitation".

I have been a member of this list for over 15 years, I suppose they will
boot me soon... We do have affiliation with ISOC Libya and ISOC China who
are not affiliated with ISOC-global, so please do be in contact if you wish
to make a bilateral affiliation (if you think you are allowed :P).

Cheers, Happy Holidays, Warm regards


Alan Levin
Chairman ISOC-ZA




---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Christine Saegesser <saegesser at isoc.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 11:54 AM
Subject: Re: Urgent: Signature of the updated ISOC Chapter Charter Letter
To: Alan Levin <alan at isoc.org.za>

Dear Alan,

I’d like to get back to you on this after further consultation among the
team and our legal team.

Chapters are very important to the work of the Internet Society to keep the
Internet open, transparent and for the benefit of all people throughout the
world.  Community engagement around our main campaigns and other important
programmes is a key element of the Internet Society’s 2019 Action Plan and
is very close to the heart of our leadership team and especially our new
President and CEO, Andrew Sullivan.

We now have 110 Chapters who signed the letter in its current version and
we’d like to invite you again to consider signing the letter as it is. We
will not be able to make these compromises on the points related to the use
of the Internet Society trademark, logos and independence.

As you know, the final version of the updated Chapter Charter letter was
shared for signature with all Internet Society Chapters at the beginning of
2018, following the extensive community consultation process undertaken
last year to develop and finalise this version of the letter. The Chapter
Charter letter defines the Internet Society’s relationship with its
Chapters and vice versa, it sets out our respective responsibilities and
limits liabilities.

>From what we know, the constitution of the South Africa Chapter (from 2007)
says the following with regards to the name of the Chapter: "The name of
the association is the South African Chapter of the Internet Society and
the recognised abbreviation thereof shall be ISOC-ZA.“ We thus understand
that the Chapter was registered under this name with the very specific aim
of being an Internet Society Chapter.

Based on this, we hope you will be able to sign the letter without the
edits (see attached). The final deadline for all Chapters to have their
Charter letters signed is 31 December 2018.

According to the Internet Society's Chapter processes, as acknowledged by
the Internet Society Board of Trustees during their last meeting, Chapters
that have not signed the current version of the Chapter Charter letter will
have to be put into rejuvenation. See also:
https://www.internetsociety.org/chapters/processes/

We hope we’ll be able to avoid that and look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Christine

---------------------------------------------------------------
Internet Society (ISOC)
Christine Saegesser Baethge
Senior Manager Global Chapter Development
Website: www.InternetSociety.org
---------------------------------------------------------------


> On 4. Oct 2018, at 13:41, Alan Levin <alan at isoc.org.za> wrote:
>
> Hi Christine,
>
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 1:20 PM Christine Saegesser <saegesser at isoc.org>
wrote:
> The conclusion of that discussion is that we’d be happy to make
compromises on some of the minor edits you made.
>
> Thanks, there are some minor improvements I can make to them too. I also
got some advice from an American member...
>
> However, there are several reasons why we cannot agree to the deletion of
the points related to the use of the Internet Society trademark, logos and
independence.
>
> So after some consideration we are willing to relinquish the logo, but
the name Internet Society is our name in our geography - we have been
independently trading with it since 1998 - and what we believe you consider
the "trademark". We will not relinquish our name :)
>
> How does that sound?
>
> Alan
> --
> Alan Levin
> ----------------------------------
> Chairman ISOC-ZA
> +27 21 4882820 (ddi)
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