Dear Colleagues, Please excuse the length of this email. In order to have a productive session in the upcoming Council workshop on "How can we become better", it is critical that you come to the workshop familiar with the material that we will be covering in the session. Attached you'll find a document, "Areas of Improvement of the ccNSO Recommendations and Suggestions". This document is a synthesis of both the recently completed ccNSO review's recommendations and suggestions, as well as Workstream 2 Accountability recommendations, which we agreed to implement independent of the Board decisions in this area. To have a successful workshop you urged to familiarize yourself with this document prior to the workshop session. The ccNSO relevant Workstream 2 recommendations, as well as Meridian Institute's recommendations and suggestions from their review, are grouped in what are called "Areas". As you will see when you review the document, some Areas are ICANN/ICANN Staff related, and some are ccNSO related. Further, the state of completeness of each Area is noted. Overall, the document is arranged per the section headings in Appendix 1 and 2 of the "Final Report: ccNSO Review Assessment & Recommendations". Recommendations and suggestions from the ccNSO Review are represented, using the same heading scheme as in the Review. Additionally, recommendations from the Work Stream 2 Final Report are identified as such as well, thus facilitating identification of overlap between the two sources. There are 21 Areas identified in the document. The primary goal of this session is to collectively review our sources for improvement. The intended work product is to identify the three Areas of highest importance. This will provide us with a critical part a roadmap as to what recommendations and suggestions Council should turn its attention to first between now and Cancun. I encourage you to read the document prior to the workshop session, and already think about how you would rank each Area in terms of importance: "High", "Medium", and "Low". I also wish to encourage you to make note of the personal criteria that you used to base your rankings, as besides discussing the Areas with respect to importance, we will also be discussing the criteria each of us used to arrive at the rankings. The format of the session will be a short overview of where we are and how we got to where we are. Each of us will then be given some time to classify each Area in terms of importance. We will then form in groups, and each group will have some time to discuss their members' ranking of Areas that they considered to be of "High Importance". We will then meet again in plenary to discuss the work of each group. From this discussion, the process will be repeated to cull the list of "High Importance" areas further, with the end goal being of identifying the three most "High Priority" areas for immediate consideration. Please come prepared, as we have a lot of material and discussion to do, and not that much time to do it in. Thank you in advance. I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Montreal. I wish you safe and uneventful travels. Best Regards, /Stephen