I forwarded this exchange to Ray Fassett, chair of the GNSO Ops WT in case they decide to include this topic in their work. Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: Stéphane Van Gelder [mailto:stephane.vangelder@indom.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 4:44 AM To: Gomes, Chuck; Avri Doria; Council GNSO Subject: Re: [council] FW: Doodle IDNG call
Both of you make good points.
I understand the limitations of wishful thinking and the difficulties involved in keeping meetings manageable in the real world, however I also think that it's only by putting these issues on the table in the hope of finding solutions to them that we will be able to move forwards.
I think we have to split our meetings into two categories (no, not open and community-based ;-) ). The Council meetings are in my mind in a class of their own. They are by necessity longer and have to be organised at set hours. These hours are generally only convenient for US-based councillors, but councillors from other regions may consider that their responsibility as GNSO council members are to attend these meetings even if they aren't always convenient (that's certainly the way I look at it).
I think the discussions we are having here start with the other meetings that we are involved in, be they WG or DT meetings or others. I'm not sure these meetings need to run over an hour systematically and need to be scheduled at 5am or midnight. And we may find that the solutions we work on to make these meetings more manageable will then also be applicable to major meetings like the Council meetings.
So at this stage it may simply be a case of getting council members' thoughts on this through our mailing list. Several suggestions have already been made, but I'm sure there are many other ideas we could look at.
Perhaps we could start a WG on this topic, first meetings scheduled for 3 to 7am next Wednesday everyone (a joke of course).
Stéphane
Le 04/05/09 21:02, « Gomes, Chuck » <cgomes@verisign.com> a écrit :
Good points Avri. Please see my comments below.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Avri Doria Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 2:41 PM To: Council GNSO Subject: Re: [council] FW: Doodle IDNG call
On 4 May 2009, at 09:54, Gomes, Chuck wrote:
We could add a 5th principle: "where some participants have to suffer unpleasant hours, we restrict meeting times to no more than one hour."
Sometimes easier said then done.
Chuck: In fact, it is easier said than done most of the
time, but the
principles at least give us some goals. Sometimes we can achieve all the goals and sometimes we won't but some of the priniples are designed to deal with cases where we cannot meet all the goals (e.g., alternating meeting times so that the same people are not always negatively impacted).
E.g. I would very much like to have council meeting be an
hour long,
and if we could more the schedule out to once a month, even better.
Chuck: I don't think we are at a point where resticting Council meetings to an hour would work but meetings for other GNSO groups can often do this.
But there is much to discuss, and people do not tend to carry on discussions on the mailing list or any other medium. Also
we often
have to approach topics more then once, because it takes a while to get all the constituency input. So while I would like to schedule meetings with fewer topics or fewer status updates, it has proven difficult. (BTW I have thought of asking for all status to be written beforehand, but we would still need time for questions, and besides I have often felt that the amount of required reading also has limited tolerance.)
One thing that I hope will help in time is if fewer council members need to be involved in the WG, and when have finished all of restructuring/"improvement" work. But to shorten meetings, i firmly believe we need to resolve more issues on line.
Also defining Ridiculous/unpleasant times may be more difficult then one may think. Some council participants, e.g. have questioned holding meeting during the evening hours when it is time for dinner and family, while for others those are the perfect hours. And given the world spread, how may times do you count that meet the 12-5am barrier - i only see two.
Chuck: You are correct if we are talking about Council meetings for which we have the five time zones represented in your attached World Meeting Planner Results. In fact, I think there are none if we are talking about a 2-hour meeting. But not all groups involve all five time zones, so some may have more options.
a.