Councilors,

I want to give you advance warning that we are going to try something new in the Board/Staff/GNSO meeting Sunday evening.  In an effort to attempt to increase the value of the session to Board members we are planning to do the following:

1.         Assign discussion topics by table

2.         Pre-assign Councilor and Staff members to tables

3.         Give Board members the choice of topic/table on a first come, first served basis.

To facilitate this, Olga, Stéphane, Glen, Gisella & I took a first crack at assigning a subset of Councilors and all of Staff to tables according to discussion topic.  We tried to do this in a manner that we hope will maximize the discussion at each table.  I won’t try to explain all of the rationale we used but want to at least say that we tried to make sure that there are at least two Councilors at each table who are well versed in the topic and, where applicable, might have some different views on the subject.

In our brief planning session tomorrow afternoon to prepare for the dinner meeting, our main focus will be to assign the remaining Councilors to tables.  The attached document lists the table topics and the seat assignments we made thus far.  I would hope that we won’t have to make many, if any, changes to these because we probably will not have enough time to do so, but we may consider a few changes if we have time.

Please review the table topics and pre-assigned seat assignments before the planning session, which is now scheduled after the New gTLD session (~ 4 pm).  For those of you who are not yet assigned to a table, please identify what topics (tables) you would prefer.  Note that there will be two tables each for two of the topics and that there will be two open tables where any topic may be discussed, with the intent to let Board members express their preferences.

During the dinner meeting, I encourage everyone to encourage Board members to ask questions they have about the topic or to express what concerns they have about it.

I fully recognize that this is a dramatic change from what we have done in the past and ask all of you to indulge your leadership team in our ‘decision by committee’ approach.

Thanks, Chuck

Please note that the schedule has gone back to the original time, Kurt will be addressing the Council at 14:00.
13:00 – 14:00 Preparation for joint GNSO/ccNSO Council meeting and Board/GNSO dinner.

Glen de Saint Géry

GNSO Secretariat

gnso.secretariat@gnso.icann.org

http://gnso.icann.org