Tom, my thinking is somewhat aligned with yours, but with some slight
variations, but I think that this is very worthwhile to develop as a "straw
proposal". As I used to manage policy development, and it involved both
internal and external policy, there were timelines "we" could control, and
some we could not -- e.g. when a policy was going to morph into a public
policy issue, such as "data retention", where governments became involved.
However, still, there were stages that were within control that could be
defined and time frames established and adhered to.

Thanks for your example. Helpful.

Marilyn 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On
Behalf Of Thomas Keller
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 10:52 AM
To: Ross Rader
Cc: Mawaki Chango; Council GNSO
Subject: Re: [council] Draft Call for papers, new gTLD PDP

Ross,

I'm very sympathetic of the idea of moving the PDP out to a seperate
document which can be amended more easily as well as I'm sympathethic
of the thought of keeping the PDP as narrow in purpose as possible. 

Having said the latter I have to note that if we start to really focus
the PDP on policy making only we need to deal with the information
gathering and understanding part in a different manner. A manner which
does not loose the benefit of the offical character of a formal PDP 
(it is my experience that a issue only gets "real" attention if there
is a decision made at the end) but with more freedom for the council
to define timelines for the research part for each issue independently. 

This could be done by a more project based approach with an PDP at
its end. Let me give you a short example:

1. The council recognises that IDNs are an important issue
2. The council officially announces a timeline and events to take place in 
   this time for research and "understanding" the IDN issue.
3. 2. can be repeated if needed
4. The staff manager produces an issues report on IDNs
5. The PDP is invoked
6. The PDP must be finished in time with an result

I guess the main sense of the last point is to have an defined end point
for each discussion. To be able to reach a result the TOR of the PDP
must be very minimal and defined very precisely. It would therefore be 
very likely that we and up with more than one PDP for each issue.

Thats my 2 cents worth on this.

Best,

tom

Am 03.01.2006 schrieb Ross Rader:

Mawaki Chango wrote:

OK, now that this is clarified and we seem to agree that we
need all those processes, the next question I'm attempted
to ask is how do we do that, to "redefine" how we should
look at the PDP?

My recommendation is two-fold. First, the amendment to the bylaws 
should be to move the GNSO PDP to a separate document. This would allow 
us to modify it in the future without having to amend ICANN's bylaws. 
The amendment should be constructed so that a majority of the board of 
directors would have to vote in favor of the amendment (as opposed to 
the 2/3s required now). Second, we should only be looking to modify the 
timelines in the PDP right now. There might be additional changes 
required in the future to streamline or otherwise make the process more 
efficient, but my preference would be to avoid a wholesale 
reconstruction of the PDP - we have work that we need to undertake 
immediately that would benefit from having clarified timelines. Let's 
make sure that we stay focused on the practical goal of getting better 
at what we do.

I have another question, Ross. What do you mean by "our
getting our technology acts together process"? As
enumerated in your ealier email, I suspect this is
something the GNSO Council might be doing as well (maybe as
part of the sausage-like PDP), so I guess I need to be able
to identify what piece is this one, thanks.

I was referring to instances where the technical environment wasn't 
quite ready for the policy work going on in the GNSO and vice versa, 
where the policy environment wasn't ready for new technical 
developments being implemented. For me, this comes down to making sure 
that we are appropriately informed regarding the capabilities of 
differing technologies (and often, identifying areas where new 
technology might be required) prior to conducting a PDP. For instance, 
the GNSO has very little understanding of the policy implications and 
new policy requirements presented by the IRIS protocol - or whether or 
not the protocol is even appropriate for the applications that some 
would like to embed in ICANN policy. In a perfect world, we would have 
a clear understanding of these implications before we conducted a PDP. 
In this world, we need to make sure that this lack of understanding 
doesn't stand in the way of the PDP and that we rise to a proper level 
of understanding of the relevant issues in a timely manner.

Regards,

-ross

Gruss,

tom

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