Hi, I preface this by noting that I'm not a member of the CCWG. On Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 04:20:11PM +0000, Jorge.Cancio@bakom.admin.ch wrote:
Any Board decision with public policy implications will (inter alia) and almost always have considered a GAC advice on such an issue.
Hence, with your overbroad and -as we have said from the start- discriminatory carve out/exclusion, the GAC would be excluded from any community decisions precisely when public policy issues are at stake.
In my opinion, the above characterisation appears not to acknowledging the GAC's agency. The point of the carve-out is to give the GAC a choice. It can issue advice, in the special meaning of that word for the purposes of the board's deliberations. In that case, the board needs a supermajority to take the decision not to follow the GAC advice. By implication, therefore, in the absence of the supermajority the board needs to accept the GAC advice and implement it. In order for the rest of the community to be ok with that arrangement, the rest of the community wants to ensure that the GAC can't also try to force re-consideration of the same advice in case the board does reject the advice by supermajority. The GAC has another choice, though, with respect to any decision with public policy implications. The GAC could decline to issue "advice" with the special meaning above, and instead (say) issue a position that does have GAC consensus but that is not issued as formal advice to the board. In that case, the 60% threshold wouldn't be invoked, but the GAC would retain the freedom to act within the Empowered Community framework. (I think it obvious that any actual board would take into consideration such a "non-advice" position; I hope we won't have to debate probabilistic statements about future possible states of affairs.) In other words, the current "package deal" proposal actually gives the GAC a new option for action. But it does so on the condition that the GAC work in the way other ACs will also work. I think that's an entirely reasonable thing to require, and the GAC _still_ has the freedom to opt out of that by issuing the formal advice that causes the supermajority rule to apply instead. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com