Councillors, On the subject of the new Friday schedule, please see below a response from Steve to a comment I made as part of the discussion around this on the ICANN Chairs' list. I asked Steve if it was OK to share his response with the Council and he agreed. IMO, this response adds a lot of context to our possible discussions on the matter. Thanks, Stéphane Début du message réexpédié :
De : Steve Crocker <steve@shinkuro.com> Objet : Rép : SO and AC plenary time at ICANN meetings Date : 4 mai 2012 14:49:44 HAEC À : Stéphane Van Gelder <stephane.vangelder@indom.com> Cc :
Stéphane,
Thanks for your thoughtful note. We're gathering inputs, getting the Prague meeting organized and will be sending at least one additional note to the community to cover these items.
The Friday Board meetings had been very lightly attended and didn't really provide either insight on the Board's thinking or opportunity for the community to interact with the Board. The other parts of the Friday schedule, reports from the Board committees and reports from the SO and AC chairs do provide a little bit of room for interaction, mostly around the SO and AC chair reports. I think that's something we want to make sure continues in some fashion, and we will weave this into the overall schedule. We will also allocate time for interaction with the Board during the Thursday afternoon session.
Once in while there are Board actions that have some content and even a bit of drama. The XXX decision in San Francisco and the decision in Singapore to move forward with the gTLD program are the two recent examples that come to mind. For matters of this import, we will have a public Board meeting. In Singapore, we did this at the beginning of the week. This was a big improvement and really helped set a positive tone for the entire week. I think this is a good pattern, and I'm inclined to follow this when it's needed. I don't know how often we'll have to do this; I suspect it will be less than half the time.
Another element in our thinking is that it's usually inappropriate to rush through a resolution at the end of the week based on developments during the week. We need to take some time to develop the proper documentation. So, instead of trying to cap the week off with resolutions passed on the basis of the week's work, we will report on what's come up during the week, what happened between the last ICANN meeting and this one, and what we plan to do following this ICANN meeting.
I look forward to inputs from you and the other chairs of the SOs and ACs.
Finally, we'll work hard to get this right by Prague, but if what we do in Prague is not good enough, we'll keep working on it.
Thanks,
Steve
On May 4, 2012, at 2:34 PM, Stéphane Van Gelder wrote:
Chris,
My two cents on this.
I think the Board is right in moving towards decisions of this kind without necessarily going through the time consuming and work heavy process of a public consultation. For things to get done in an organization such as ICANN, the body placed in charge of that organization much enjoy some element of trust from the community to take decisions like these.
However, for that trust to be well deserved, the Board must also be able to listen to feedback from the community and act on it promptly. In this case, I am hearing very clear messages that there needs to be some kind of interaction between the Board and the community in a formal setting such as the one that was provided by the Friday Board meeting. I feel it is therefore crucial for the Board sessions planned on Thursday to act as effective replacements to the now defunct Friday Board meeting in that regard.
I also think the Board must actively address the loss-of-transparency issues that this Friday program change has raised. I for one will be watching very carefully in Prague to see if the new Thursday sessions live up to the community's Board transparency requirements.
Thanks,
Stéphane Van Gelder Directeur Général / General manager INDOM Group NBT France ---------------- Head of Domain Operations Group NBT