On 19/01/2016 09:21, Jordan Carter wrote:
Greg, all
I have seen a few comments along the 'we are ignoring the public comments! Omg!' track in the past few days, and to be honest I am a little confused.
Jordan, I wouldn't want to say "OMG!", but I also have concerns about our approach. I think it is undeniable that the approach we took following the first public comment round gave a much more thorough and systematic attention to comments received than the approach we are taking this time. It seems we no longer have the energy to repeat that exercise.
My impression was and is that:
- the working method we are using was documented, discussed and agreed by the CCWG.
A timeline was agreed. At the time we "agreed the working method", I must confess I struggled to understand what was being proposed. Maybe that is my fault, for not standing up and asking for greater clarity. As it happens, I think the root cause of the limited attention is the decision to do everything in plenary. It simply isn't practical to do a detailed review of every aspect of this Report at that level, which is why we had Working Parties and Working Party subgroups in the first place. But abandoning that approach was indeed agreed by the CCWG, and I suspect it was simply that we are running out of energy. Maybe it's too late to change this. But even though we all share the responsibility, and it's not fair to simply blame the co-chairs, I do think it's perfectly legitimate to say "Hold up a minute! This process isn't working too well".
- in preparing the first reading docs, all of the public comments and the trends from them were taken into account - they are what drives the 'issues to discuss' the co-chair documents set out.
Well it's not at all clear how these "issues to discuss" are selected. It does seem remarkably close in practice to "make sure that the Board's concerns are considered, and leave out anything else unless a particular stakeholder is likely to kick up a fuss in plenary". Not that I'm suggesting the co-chairs are doing that deliberately, but if these decisions are made by a few acting in private, without a transparent and systematic approach, then that's where you end up anyway.
What am I missing? How are people concluding that we aren't doing due diligence? What have we missed that should have been taken into account?
On thing we are missing is proper analysis of the comments we have received in support of our proposal. Some comments in support are simply content with whatever happens. The ASO, for example, has made clear that with limited exceptions it is content with whatever we decide, and just wants us to wrap this up as soon as possible. Other stakeholders and members of the public, however, support our proposal and have made clear that they would actively disagree with changes to key elements of it. This is not being properly considered. Our process is causing us to give excessive attention to relatively few comments of disagreement, and to devalue the comments supporting our proposal. Where a comment asking for change is considered, we usually have nothing before us at all on comments received that would oppose that change: these are taken, wrongly, as merely being content. By far the most thorough review of comments on this round that we have had (prior to this staff assessment) was Becky's slideset on the Mission. Even there though, the assessment that "Most commenters supported proposed Mission Statement, including regulatory prohibiton" was given only those nine words; the remainder of 16 pages was dedicated to considering those few comments that asked for changes, without any analysis of whether those "most comments" opposed making such changes or the reasoning they offered. On other Recommendations, we haven't even had that much. This process is pushing us towards producing a Fourth Draft Report that looks like the Third Draft Report as amended by the Board.
Accepting as I do that the public comments are being dealt with properly, I also have an opinion that the group has largely come to a rough consensus on many points, and that unless there was an overwhelming weight of comments demanding a change to something, changes are at this point unlikely.
That's not what I see happening though. -- Malcolm Hutty | tel: +44 20 7645 3523 Head of Public Affairs | Read the LINX Public Affairs blog London Internet Exchange | http://publicaffairs.linx.net/ London Internet Exchange Ltd Monument Place, 24 Monument Street, London EC3R 8AJ Company Registered in England No. 3137929 Trinity Court, Trinity Street, Peterborough PE1 1DA