Hello All, As agreed during our teleconference on 6 Feb 2006, the meeting in Washington will be for the Committee working on the new gTLD policy development process. The Committee is of the whole Council, but where a Council member cannot attend, they may nominate another person from their constituency to participate. The constituency/Council member should inform the GNSO Secretariat of such a nomination prior to the meeting. I am hoping that Olof will be able to at least have a draft Initial Report that summarises the constituency input, the papers that have been submitted in response to our call for papers, and the public comments submitted via the ICANN website. The aim of the meeting will be to consider this report and identify areas of consensus. We are essentially operating under the provisions of section 8(b) and 8(c), of Annex A of the ICANN bylaws. One thing we did not cover in the Council call, was whether to hold an open public forum. Given that there were a few Council members that were against this idea, and also given the additional logistics and costs of arranging such a forum, I suggest instead that we follow up on our call for papers on 3 January 2006: http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-03jan06.htm . In that call for papers we stated: "Received papers will be considered for oral presentations to the GNSO Council during February 2006, via scheduled conference calls with the GNSO Council." We could simply set up a conference bridge to allow selected authors of papers to call-in, and where cost is an issue we can call-out to appropriate people. Please let me know if you agree with this approach, and also please identify any particular papers where you think it would be beneficial for the author to present a summary of the paper orally and respond to questions. I will also ask Olof to review the received papers with this in mind. Glen can then contact the authors and see who may be available (we may have to schedule time appropriate to the time zones of the authors). I think it is important to ensure future substantial contributions to the policy development process, that the Committee gives significant attention to considering these submissions - and doesn't simply rely on reading a staff summary. Regards, Bruce Tonkin