Hi Katrina, All,

 

I agree with the proposed way forward.

 

Regards,

 

Giovanni

 

 

 

Dear Councillors,

 

On our call on 24th February, we identified one session as “must do” for ICANN67 -  the Council meeting. This meeting is required to elect the chair and vice-chairs, and to assign roles and responsibilities to Councillors for the upcoming year. The chair and vice-chair(s) are elected for a term of one year. The current term started at the end of ICANN64 in Kobe, Japan. 

 

In terms of the relevant Guideline (section 3.2 of the Guideline: ccNSO Council Roles and Responsibilities, see: https://ccnso.icann.org/sites/default/files/field-attached/roles-responsibilities-council-26feb18-en.pdf ) “The ccNSO Council will be governed by one Chair and two Vice-chairs, known as the Council leaders. [..] The term of the Council leaders is one year.” 

 

Note that the ICANN Bylaws do not specify the terms or time of election. According to Section 10.3 (j) of the Bylaws: “… The term of office of the ccNSO Council Chair and any Vice Chair(s) shall be as specified by the ccNSO Council at or before the time the selection is made.” Effectively, it refers to the aforementioned Guideline. Its Section 3.1 says: “The ccNSO Chair, Vice-chairs and Councillors are responsible for identifying, allocating and agreeing on the workload among Councillors [..] This allocation takes place annually at the first face-to-face meeting of the Council in the calendar year”.

 

Clearly, we did not foresee that the first ICANN meeting of the year, or any for that matter, would be cancelled, i.e. we would not conduct an in person Council meeting. So, how to move forward? 

 

For all we know at the moment, our first face-to-face meeting might be in Kuala Lumpur in June or even in Hamburg in October this year. However, we did foresee that under circumstance that the Guideline “does not provide guidance and/or the impact is unreasonable to conduct the business of the ccNSO or the ccNSO Council” then “the Chair of the ccNSO will decide”. (Section 4.2). In my view, we are now at the point when Section 4.2 needs to be applied (unfortunately).

 

For the record:

 - The ICANN67 meeting in Cancun has been cancelled but will be held via remote participation only,

 - According to the Guideline: ccNSO Council Roles and Responsibilities (2018) the election of the ccNSO Chair and Vice-chairs and allocation of roles and responsibilities of the Councillors takes place at the first face-to-face meeting of the Council in the calendar year,

- Previous allocation of roles and responsibilities, including the election of Chair and Vice-chair, was done at ccNSO Council  face-to-face meetings, the last one in Kobe, March 2019, i.e. a year ago,

- The procedure in the Guideline has unreasonable impact on the business of the ccNSO because the time for the next face-to-face meeting at the moment is unknown,

based on Section 4.2 of the Guideline, the Chair decides:

- the ccNSO Council needs to make the required appointments during the timeframe of ICANN67 even if we do not meet face-to-face,

 - the term of the newly elected Chair, Vice-Chairs, and roles and responsibilities of the Councillors starts at the end of ICANN67, which is the first ICANN meeting of 2020.

 

Assuming that you agree with the reasoning and decision, we now need to agree on the date and the time of the meeting. Additionally, we need to agree on the procedure of the Chair and Vice-Chair(s) election as, again, this procedure was clearly developed for a face-to-face meetings (see Section 3.2.1 & 3.2.2 of the Guideline).

 

Date and Time

Taking into account time zones of all our Councillors and keeping in mind that we need quorum to take decisions, we usually have our calls at 12:00 UTC and 18:00 UTC. It is suggested to keep meetings scheduled during ICANN67 dates in the Cancun time zone. That would mean that the earliest time for our call is 14:00 UTC. This time does not work for any of the AP Councillors. We could opt for 18:00 UTC; however, this does not work for Young-Eum, Hiro, and Ajay and will very likely conflict with ICANN’s public sessions.  Alternatively, we have also explored the possibility to have the call at 12:00 UTC (this, unfortunately, understandably never works for Jordan as it is 1 -2 am his time).

 

After some research and negotiations with ICANN staff, we booked a slot on Thursday, 12 March 2020 at noon UTC. Do you agree?

 

Chair – Vice Chair(s) Election Procedure

As you will recall, every chair and vice-chair(s) election requires that a candidate is nominated and seconded, and the candidate should be in the position to accept or decline the nomination. Furthermore, as we have seen in the past, sometimes we have two or more candidates for a position, in which case we are required to run a secret vote. It is obvious that we cannot do this during a call. This means that we have to go through nomination period and voting before the call. We, therefore, propose the following procedure:

 

* Nomination & seconding period (public):

 - Start: Thu, 27 February 2020 (00:01 UTC)

- Close: Wed, 04 March 2020 (12:00,i.e. noon UTC)

 

* Acceptance of nominations: for the entire duration of the nomination period, until latest Wed, 4 March 2020, 16:00 UTC

 

* Secret voting (in any case) period:

- Ballots distributed: Wed, 4 March 2020, shortly after 16:00 UTC

- Voting (secret):

         - Start: Thu, 5 March 2020 (00:01 UTC)

         - Close: Wednesday, 11 March 2020 (23:59 UTC)

 

Please note that according to the Guideline, the chair and vice-chairs need to be from different Geographic Regions. This has proven to be a sound principle. For the time being, I believe we do not need to make specific arrangement for this situation. However, if necessary, after the nomination period is closed, we may need to include an intermediate ballot to ensure the regional diversity among vice-chairs.

  

As to other roles and responsibilities, please have a look at the table again (attached) and think whether you wish to continue with the role (unless there are term limitations) or are looking for other ways to contribute. We will finalise the table during the call.

 

Finally, as you may have noted, our call on Monday was open to all interested community members. Normally, our meetings during ICANN meetings are open as well. I suggest that we open this call too. Moving forward, I think we should allow public attendance to all Council meeting/calls.

 

Does the suggested plan and way forward look reasonable to you? If you have any other suggestions, questions, comments, please let me know as soon as possible because according to the proposed plan, nominations start tomorrow.

 

Thank you!

 

Kind regards,

 

]{atrina