To get a few facts on the table: The mandate of this group was not to set CCWG rules, but to establish a baseline for what the GNSO thought was important before entering into discussions with the ALAC, ccNSO, ASO, GAC, or whosoever wanted to participate. That is clear in the motion. Since the GNSO rarely "delegates" responsibility to negotiate on its behalf to its Chair or others, it was felt that it was important to understand the overall issues from the GNSO perspective before entering into multi-lateral discussions (which for practical reasons will surely include a only small subset of the GNSO Council). Moreover, it was felt that input from the GNSO as a whole, and not just the Council was important. That being said, the GNSO did have an interest in ensuring that what it proposed was reasonable and factored in, to the extent possible, the needs of other groups. At the express request of the Council, I participated in this group and was more than a bit active. It is not clear exactly what will come out of the final discussions with other ACs and SOs, but I do not recall anything in the final results of this drafting team that are totally unreasonable. Several of the points are very GNSO-centric (and perhaps ccNSO) in that they repeatedly stipulate that formal "policy" must be carried out under the rules set out in the ICANN Bylaws for such policy development. I personally think that this was not needed, since it is in the Bylaws, but others felt it was good to reiterate. The point that will no doubt be a lightening rod following the JAS group is the stipulation that when formed, a CCWG should have a single charter. Although in the far reaches of my imagination I can come up with reasons that this should not be a rule, but I not at all sure that such edge cases need to be dealt with here. If the interests of the various parties are so different at the start, perhaps a CCWG is not what we need. Note that this principle talks about the FORMATION of a CCWG. I do not believe that we have ever participated in a CCWG that had multiple disagreeing charters at the beginning. It is not clear why one would enter into the creation of such a group if the aims of the participating bodies were not similar. In fact, those who were around may recall that for the JAS group, we did agree on a single charter. Due to a clerical (honestly!) error, one clause was omitted from the version that the GNSO approved. When the charter came up to the ALAC, the ALAC decided to drop that clause as well, as it was felt that it was not sufficiently important to warrant delaying the entire process until it could go back to the GNSO for re-chartering (and we believed that the group WOULD look at that issue regardless of whether it was in the charter). Other CCWGs such as DSSA all had a single charter agreed to by one mechanism or another ahead of time. You will notice that the principles are silent on the issue of re-chartering part-way through a process, the situation where JAS blew up. If you recall the sequence of events there: - the WG came up with a suggested revised charter. - this time it was the ALAC that got to it first, and it was approved. - when it came to the GNSO, there was substantive discomfort and they did radical surgery to it, taking out some parts and adding others (one of which the ALAC really liked). - at that point, the JAS group would have had two charters, which in some cases could be construed as requiring they work in two orthogonal directions at the same time - something that was not tenable. - the ALAC revised its version, making it clear that the JAS charter had a core part that was common to both the GNSO and ALAC, and several other end-products that were unique to the ALAC but did not go against any of the core items. - that was perhaps a bit awkward to work with, but the JAS WG was willing and things proceeded to the eventual VERY successful outcome, with the GNSO supporting all end-products equally, even the ones that they had not included in their charter. Another area that may attract discussion is about the rules that a CCWG will follow. The principles simple say that to the extent possible, the WG rules of the constituent bodies should be followed. If they were all the same, that would clearly be no problem. But in fact, other than the GNSO, I suspect no other organization has such a detailed set of rules. The ALAC, in its own WGs, has generally abided by the GNSO rules where they made sense and ignored those that did not. Perhaps some day the ALAC will formalize what its rules are. Or not. It *is* clear that the rules and certainly the practices currently vary, and although I am sure that every organization would feel comfortable with *their* rules dominating, what will come out of this process is some sort of a compromise, perhaps varying based on which bodies participate. And they will likely vary over time as we get used to these new groups. The principles are wisely completely silent on the issue, other than to say that the charter should specify the rules for any given WG. Note that this set of principles does not attempt to address (nor should they) how one reaches consensus within a given WG. Whatever rules are adopted for that group will need to address it, but it may be specific to the issue and who the chartering bodies are. The GNSO meeting where this will be discussed is on Thursday at 11:00 UTC. If anyone has any input for me as the formal ALAC Liaison, please get it to me as soon as possible (the meeting is at 06:00 my time, so I will be offline for the several hours preceding the meeting). As I cannot make suggestions for formal changes to the motion, please make sure to copy Bill as well. Alan At 17/01/2012 04:29 PM, William Drake wrote:
Thanks Evan. We've talked about this enough so I'm aware of your general stance, which I broadly share. But what would be particularly helpful to know is whether AL has any specific responses to specific elements of the proposed principles, including suggestions of language tweaks. If not ok, but thought I'd askĀ
Best
Bill
On Jan 17, 2012, at 10:17 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
On 17 January 2012 15:23, William Drake <william.drake@uzh.ch> wrote:
People may wish to have a look at the Principles http://gnso.icann.org/drafts/draft-principles-for-cwgs-23dec11-en.pdf, which specify that all SO/ACs involved should adopt and follow a single joint charter for CWGs, that CWGs outputs do not express community consensus per se, and so on.
Hi Bill. Thanks for the update, and for the efforts of you and the NCSG on the issue.
The GNSO is welcome to do whatever it wants to unilaterally regarding its internal processes, but it cannot impose such regulation on others.
As happened with the JAS group, I for one will not abide by any imposed regimen that prohibits an important effort from moving forward because a community (or group of communities) refuses to agree on a charter (or tries to scale back an existing one). Specifically, I would certainly not agree to any move that artificially limited ALAC's bylaw-mandated scope by excluding the interests of end-users.
It is significant -- and very telling -- that the GNSO policy about working with other constituencies was itself formed in isolation from these constituencies. This was definitely an opportunity missed, but I won't lose sleep over it. It's my understanding that the At-Large Community has always been eager to participate in cross-community groups, but we will not have the terms of that participation dictated to us.
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