Stephane, I would be happy to sponsor a motion derived from the report of the Drafting Team, just not this motion. When the BC asked for the motion to be deferred in Dakar, it was with the intention to offer a friendly amendment. When we went looking to do that, we realized both the Councillors involved (and with whom we would need to confer) were no longer on the scene. Our confusion on the matter is what led to my initial email on this matter. The BC's concerns are based on its current position that "We prefer that support provided is featured as support to the constituency/SG, rather than centralized in permanent ICANN staff…" The charter's call to "consolidate human and financial resources relating to GNSO outreach" falls well short of recognizing the importance of each constituencies' role on the front lines of expanding this multi-stakeholder, consensus-driven, bottom-up organization. And the charter also seems to mandate participation of groups (e.g., ALAC) that are outside the scope of the Council's role. Even if consolidation and central command-and-control are ultimately the best way to go, we need to begin by knowing more than we do. For that reason, I would offer that we approve Objective 3 of the draft charter at this time. It will be hard to agree to do more until we have this data in hand. It reads: Objective 3: The OTF shall conduct a survey of existing GNSO outreach activities by the stakeholder groups, constituencies, and ICANN, including the Fellowship program, to identify: 1. Populations engaged in domain name system (DNS) issues but otherwise underrepresented in ICANN; 2. Individuals and organizations involved in related DNS/Internet Governance organizations; 3. Industries and organizations (public, private, nonprofit, government related, Internet Society (ISOC) Chapters, attorneys and other professional associations) with an interest in DNS/Internet Governance; 4. People and organizations that may have submitted comments to ICANN, but who are not regularly engaged in a GNSO Working Group ; 5. People who were previously active within ICANN; 6. Universities that focus on studies and research related to DNS/ Internet Governance; and 7. Successful and pioneer projects that are happening now in some regions. Cheers, Berard -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [council] Outreach Task Force Charter motion, (item 3 of our agenda on Thursday) From: Stéphane_Van_Gelder <stephane.vangelder@indom.com> Date: Mon, November 14, 2011 9:11 am To: GNSO Council <council@gnso.icann.org> Councillors, This is to inform you of discussion that has been happening on the above topic. John Berard contacted the Council Leadership a few days ago asking whether the OTF motion could still be considered at our next Council meeting, in light of the fact that both maker and seconder of the motion (Olga and Debbie) are no longer on the Council. In order to frame our answer, we first put to the question to ICANN general counsel. The response was that there is no special provision for this in the bylaws. So simply put, we're on our own here. The Leadership Team and Support Staff have discussed this just now during our usual planning conference call that happens ahead of every Council meeting and we have looked at some possible options. As a reminder, we find ourselves in this situation because the motion has already been deferred once. I am of the opinion that despite the fact that its sponsors are no longer on the Council, the motion itself is valid and therefore should be considered. However, we could do several things: - Request two new sponsors for the motion at the start of this agenda item. - Request whether there would be any opposition to, due to exceptional circumstances, a second deferral of the motion. - Vote on the motion at this meeting, and accept the outcome as the decision of the Council, which is what we do for every motion anyway. If we go ahead and vote on the motion and it does not have two new sponsors, we may have to deal with possible proposed amendments. In this case, as there would be no-one to accept them as friendly, I suggest that we would have to treat them as unfriendly by default and vote on them first. I put these options to you now so that you will have time to think about them before Thursday's meeting and maybe refer to your groups. No action or decision is expected before then. I will present these options to the Council again as we come to this item on Thursday. Thanks, Stéphane