Greetings,

As I noted in my remarks during Thursday's call, the ICANN Board has passed a resolution in which it accepted the recommendation of its Board Governance Committee (BGC) that a new Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee be established to manage oversight of ICANN's accountability mechanisms.

The establishment of this new Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee will require a change in a Fundamental Bylaw, which  will trigger an "Approval Action Board Notice" and subsequent review (and approval?) by the Empowered Community of the proposed Bylaw change.

The Board resolution is available here: https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/resolutions-2017-02-03-en#2.a.  Chris Disspain (Chair of the BGC) has written a blog post regarding the proposal, which can be found at https://www.icann.org/news/blog/chairman-s-blog-en.

I confess that I never thought the first exercise of Community Oversight under the new Bylaws would involve an approval action over a Bylaws change, as it never occurred to me that the Board would start meddling with the Bylaws just over three months after their adoption.  Having said that, I do not see anything nefarious in what the BGC has proposed, and what the Board has decided via their resolution to implement.  Also, it appears that there is going to be a coordinated effort on the part of the Board and ICANN Staff to orchestrate the adoption of the revised Bylaw so as optimize the timing of the initiation of the "Approval Action Community Forum Period."  My guess (and this is only a guess) is that this will coordinated so that the required Approval Action Community Forum can be scheduled for ICANN 59 in Johannesburg.

FYI, there will be an organisational meeting of the Empowered Community Administration at ICANN 58 in Copenhagen.  Lastly, I fully expect that the Guidelines Review Committee will have the necessary Guidelines for handling the Approval Action Process before the Council for adoption prior to the triggering by the ICANN Board of the Approval Action Board Notice, so we should be in good shape from a procedural standpoint.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions you might have about the Approval Action process, the Guidelines under development to handle the Approval Process, or the ECA in general.

Best Regards,

/Stephen