Council Colleagues -

Donna, Heather, and I have been working with Staff to do a bit of “spring cleaning” on our Action Items list. One of the open items from last year calls for the SCI to review GNSO Council Voting Thresholds.

The default voting threshold for the GNSO is a simple majority, >50% of each House. Some specific votes (see ICANN Bylaws, Article X, Sec.3(9)) require a different voting threshold such as, for example, a “supermajority” threshold or an affirmative vote of more than one-fourth (1/4) vote of each House or majority of one House (create an Issue Report). All the current non-standardvoting thresholds relate to votes that are linked to a Policy Development Process, including for example: terminating an existing PDP, or modifying a PDP recommendation before sending it on to the Board.

Currently, any vote that is not specifically excluded defaults to the simple majority vote. There was some discussion a while back (regarding Council adoption of Spec 13) that passing some motions with a simple majority were equivalent to amending existing (2007) PDPs, which would require a supermajority.

Also, Council noted that we were frequently voting on situations that weren’t otherwise covered, including motions related to the IANA transition and Accountability work. Some suggested that these topics warranted a supermajority threshold, and the Action Item to send this over to the SCI was born. The Councilors who initially raised this issue have since moved on, and we completed the votes on IANA and Accountability using our existing procedures, so this item has been marked “pending" for several months.

But I’d like to disposition the action item one way or the other. So, if you believe this topic is still a concern and would like to volunteer to take the lead (see attached SCI Review Request), please respond by Friday 22 APR.

Otherwise, if there’s no further interest, we'll close out the action item.

Thanks—