Dear Councillors, During the ccNSO Council call yesterday, it was suggested by the ccNSO Secretariat to change the process in which new Working Group members are accepted. The current process is that all working group members need to be approved by the Council. As we quite often receive requests for working group membership outside of the call for volunteers period, we suggested, in order to speed up the process, that we only require the approval of the Working Group Chair, and then inform the Council on who has been added. It was, however, pointed out during yesterday’s discussion that in some cases “controversial people” might be able to obtain a working group seat if the process gets outside of the Council’s control and that that the changed procedures in general could be abused by people who were not approved by the Council in the first place. As this probably only would happen in very rare cases, it would be desirable that the Council comes up with a solution which would suit both the wish for a smoother and faster process, but would not leave the Council out of total control. A solution could be to introduce a right for the Council to “veto” a Working Group Chair decision. However, I would welcome more thoughts and suggestions on this. This topic will also be discussed during the upcoming Council call on the 1st March. Kind regards, Gabi