Council Colleagues —

Attached and copied below, please find a draft letter from the Council to Akram Atallah, in response to his recent blog post (“Conduct at ICANN Meetings” https://www.icann.org/news/blog/conduct-at-ICANN-meetings).

In this note, I set out to make some high-level points that support further work in this area, without weighing in on any specific indecent.  Also, the letter references a statement from the NCUC ExCom (“Statement from NCUC Executive Committee” http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/2016-March/018488.html) and the ICANN Harassment Policy drafted by our volunteers (attached), and urges any future effort to consider these materials.

If possible, please review these documents prior to our next call on 14 APR.  We can collect edits and then decide if/how we want to proceed.

Thank you,

J.

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Akram Atallah

COO and interim CEO, ICANN

 

Dear Akram –

 

On behalf of the GNSO Council, we would like to thank your for your recent blog post (“Conduct at ICANN Meetings”)[1].  Members of the Council, and all of the GNSO Stakeholder Groups and Constituencies, share the goal of ensuring that all members of the community can participate in and contribute to ICANN, in an environment where harassment and discrimination are not tolerated.

 

Without passing judgment on any specific incident, we are encouraged by the commitment from Staff and the Board to engage the community on this subject.

In support of this, volunteers on the Council have prepared a draft (“ICANN Conference Harassment Policy”, attached). Several questions remain open, however, including:

 

·      Whether this Policy would enhance, or be distinct from, the existing Expected Standards of Behavior policy

·      Whether complaints would be reported to ICANN Staff, or the Office of the Ombudsman, or some other entity or group

·      How the policy will be enforced, and

·      Other topics and questions that will arise from this work.

 

We expect that members of the GNSO community will be engaged in this effort, and note that some have already undertaken work in their own groups (“Statement from NUCU Executive Committee”[2]).  We urge this group to consider these materials in any community undertaking to develop new policy addressing this issue.

 

Thank you

 

 

Donna Austin, GNSO Vice-Chair

James Bladel, GNSO Chair

Heather Forrest, GNSO Vice-Chair