Dear Chartering Organizations,

The Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) is pleased to provide its Chartering Organizations with its report on Work Stream 1 recommendations. You can download the full report here: https://community.icann.org/x/8w2AAw.

As per the CCWG-Accountability’s Charter, we now seek your approval to submit this final report to the ICANN Board and ask you to consider this approval in accordance with your respective SO or AC rules and procedures by 9 March 2016 to meet the overall timing requirements, which would allow the IANA Stewardship Transition (as a whole) to proceed.

The report is the result of extensive work by the CCWG-Accountability’s 28 members, 175 participants and a team of highly qualified legal advisors since December 2014, which included over 221 calls or meetings, 3 public consultations and more than 13,900 email messages. It represents a carefully crafted balance between key requirements, specific legal advice, and significant compromises by all who participated and includes diligent attention to the input received through the Public Comment proceedings.

The final proposal has received the consensus support of the CCWG-Accountability with five minority statements from members recorded for Chartering Organization consideration (see Appendix A). Please note that we are publishing our report today with the minority statements delivered by the original 19 February deadline, but we have given our members a final opportunity to revise, retract or add minority statements based on our compromise reached this morning. We will send you a revised Appendix A on 25 February.

As noted in the CCWG-Accountability report, the group worked to meet both NTIA requirements for the overall IANA Stewardship Transition (Annex 14), and the CWG-Stewardship dependencies for the naming community on ICANN accountability enhancements (Annex 13). The co-chairs of the CWG-Stewardship and the CCWG-Accountability have coordinated their efforts. The CWG-Stewardship will deliver a letter to you confirming that its dependencies have been met, thus allowing the IANA Stewardship Transition proposal to move forward.

We will make ourselves together with or other key contributors available to you before and during the ICANN 55 meeting in Marrakech to answer any questions you may have and explain any details of the report. For your information, further background documents as well as the slides, recordings and transcripts of recent webinars explain the details of the final proposal are available here: https://community.icann.org/x/ogDxAg.

Should you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you very much for your continued support.

Thomas Rickert, Mathieu Weill and Leon Sanchez