I was charged with drafting the starting point for recommendations on the GNSO PDP and Cross-constituency work. For a bunch of reasons, I have not been able to put nearly sufficient effort into this. The PDP recommendation is likely to change as our external expert works, but based on the discussions that we had with groups at Durban, greatly augmented by the PDP Chairs thread that I forwarded, some of the themes of our recommendation are already pretty solid. I have not addressed early GAC involvement, as this is partially covered by Fiona's contributions and I thought it better to work from one document. I will, however give an early view of how I am thinking about things now. We have usually used words like "the GAC must participate in GNSO PDPs". I now think that wording it like this is setting an operational methodology instead of first setting the setting the goal. It makes little sense (to me) to have a PDP deliver its recommendations to the Board and then have the GAC re-open issues that concern its members at the Board level. I think that the goal is ensuring that issues of interest to governments and the GAC are known to the PDP WG, and are fairly considered, and that as recommendations are formulated, there is a feedback loop involving the GAC. Exactly HOW to do that is not clear, but unless we set it as a target, we will never achieve it. There has been a lot of rhetoric about GAC members not being able to sustain the presumed level of effort that goes into GNSO PDP. Before we try to figure out mechanisms for achieving the above goal, we need to recognize that: - the efforts described above have occurred (in my recollections) for only one or two PDPs, and then only for a few weeks (and due to Board deadlines/ultimatums) - most PDPs are about operational issues that have proven of no interest to the GAC - the new gTLD PDP, which has received so much after0the0fact focus, is never likely to be repeat for a whole bunch of reasons (including having learned a bunch of lessons in the ensuing years). - there WILL be PDPs of interest to the GAC coming up soon (RAA, son-of-Whois) and we really need to fix this problem quickly. On the Cross-constituency issue, I re-wrote this document several times and am almost as unhappy with the final one as the earlier versions. One of the reasons was that although we often talk about the need for more cross-const work, other than the specific GAC-GNSO and some targeted GNSO-ALAC issues, iI found it hard to come up with concrete examples. Mikey's note that I just forwarded covers one I missed. Alan