Hi All

 

I probably won’t pick up on everything but did want to clarify a few points on the process. 

 

Although it certainly was the case in the past that PDP WGs selected their chair, we moved away from that some time ago, I believe, as part of the PDP3.0 improvements. When WGs select, we often saw co-chairs appointed, rather than a single chair, and sometimes multiple co-chairs  due to an apparent inability or unwillingness of the WG members to select a single candidate when multiple volunteers come forward.  The template PDP charter now states that “The GNSO Council leadership and Standing Selection Committee leadership will jointly review the responses and will propose a Chair to the GNSO Council which will then either affirm the selection or reject the selection and send the process back to the GNSO Council leadership and Standing Selection Committee leadership.”  This is the language in the DNS Abuse PDP1 charter, was used in the charter for Latin Diacritics, and was included in PDP Charters at least as early 2018 for the EPDP Temp Spec.

 

While the SSC is not tasked specifically with selecting PDP chairs, its charter tasks it in more general terms with making selections for ICANN structures such as Review Teams, as requested by Council.  The PDP charter does however signal a possible role for the SSC. Under the PDP charter, Council Leadership could have made this selection ourselves and recommended the candidate to Council for approval.  For a number of reasons, we felt that it was preferable to seek the assistance of the SSC, including that it’s a high community-interest topic, there were multiple candidates, rather than only a single clearly-eligible candidate, and the SSC route would allow representatives from each SG/C to have a voice in the process.  This is not the only PDP chair selection that has been referred to the SSC.  Most recently, the SSC conducted the selection of the chair for the Latin Diacritics PDP, where again there were multiple candidates.

 

It is, I believe, always the case that SSC recommendations must be voted-on by Council, as will be the case here.  Council is not required to follow the SSC recommendation, but given the representative nature of that group and the expectation that it will recommend a candidate with full consensus, it seems likely to be an unusual occurrence where Council does not feel able to support that recommendation. 

 

Again, for the avoidance of doubt, the first communication to the PDP WG members stated clearly that the chair candidate selected by the SSC was subject to approval by Council but that pending that approval they would be starting work in preparing for the ICANN 85 meetings, to ensure smooth progress and a timely start of the PDP work.

 

I don’t hear anyone saying that they do not intend to support the recommended candidate in the upcoming vote, but if that is the case it would be helpful if Councillors could flag that as early as possible.

 

Many thanks