Hello All, Several Council members have suggested setting up a regular administrative/planning call. The purpose of the call would be to plan the work of the GNSO Council, and work with the ICANN staff manager (Olof Nordling) to allocate appropriate staff resources to this Council work. I would like to work towards: - a 4 month plan of projects that have GNSO and staff resources allocated to them - a 12 month plan that includes projects that are not able to be resourced in the current 4 month period, plus an estimate of possible work items that may arise in the next 12 months - a 3 year plan that identifies major policy issues that may arise in the next 3 years The 12 month and 3 year plans will help provide input into ICANN overall operational and strategic planning process. The 4 month plan will also prioritise projects in order of importance. We need to incorporate recommendations from the GNSO Council review into the planning process. Once we have a clearer planning framework, we can then consistently report progress against that framework. The reporting can be used to report activities to the Board and wider community (perhaps we can work towards a newsletter every 4 months for the GNSO community, as well as an annual report on projects). As Grant has raised this issue several times, and also carried out a detailed review of the ICANN operational plan, I hope that Grant will volunteer to chair a series of planning meetings. Hopefully by the Vancouver meeting we will have a document that has details for a 4 month plan, and then some short descriptions of 12 month and 3 month views. Note the planning process will not be creating any new policies, but merely planning work on policies that have been discussed within regular council meetings. The outputs of the planning process would be shared with the full Council. I recommend an initial call next week for those Councillors that wish to be involved: E.g Tuesday 6 September, Coordinated Universal Time UTC 10:00 (6:00 Washington DC, 12:00 Brussels, 20:00 Melbourne, 22:00 Auckland) Regards, Bruce Tonkin