At the request of the Chair of the WHOIS Survey Drafting Team, I submit this motion for the Council's consideration. The motion asks us to approve the formation of the WHOIS Survey WG, with the attached charter, and sets a timeline for its work. The survey will come back to Council before being sent. The motion is attached and included below: Thanks to Liz Gasster for drafting. --Wendy Draft Motion to approve charter for Whois Survey Working Group (WS-WG) Whereas there have been discussions for several years on the adequacy of the current set of Whois tools to provide the necessary functions to support existing and proposed Whois service policy requirements, and there have been questions as to the adequacy of these tools for use in an IDN environment (see: joint SSAC Working Group on Internationalized Registration Data, https://community.icann.org/display/gnsossac/Internationalized+Registration+... ), and there have been extensive discussions about the requirements of the Whois service with respect to Registry and registrar operations in the GNSO community (see: history of Whois policy activity: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/whois-services/ ), and new architectures and tools have been developed and suggested by the technical community (see: development of IRIS RFC by the IETF: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4698 and initial IETF discussion of RESTful and current draft: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/weirds/current/maillist.html and http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sheng-weirds-icann-rws-dnrd-00 ); Whereas on 07 May 2009, the GNSO Council resolved that Policy Staff, with the assistance of technical staff and GNSO Council members as required, should collect and organize a comprehensive set of requirements for the Whois service policy tools; Whereas on 26 March 2010, Staff published a first draft of a Whois Service Requirements Inventory report, soliciting input from SOs and ACs; Whereas on 31 May 2010, Staff posted a draft final report which reflected SO and AC input, soliciting input from the GNSO Council and community at the Brussels ICANN Public Meeting; Whereas on 29 July 2010, Staff published the Inventory of Whois Service Requirements – Final Report; Whereas on 19 May 2011, the GNSO Council asked Staff to issue a call for expertise seeking community volunteers to form a Whois Survey drafting team for the purpose of developing a survey of views regarding Whois Service Requirements; Whereas in July 2011, several of these volunteers drafted a proposed charter for a Whois Survey “Working Group”, preferring the term “Working Group” to “Drafting Team” in this case; Resolved, The GNSO Council convenes a Whois Survey Working Group (WS-WG) of interested volunteers to draft, implement, and analyze the results of a survey measuring the level of support for various technical requirements outlined in the final Inventory of Whois Service Requirements Report of 29 July 2010. The GNSO Council further approves the proposed charter for the Whois Survey Working Group as defined here: <insert link here> [attached] In accordance with this charter, the Whois Survey Working Group plans to produce a draft survey to be delivered to the GNSO Council for approval by March 2012. Following approval, the Whois Survey Working Group plans to then conduct this survey for a period not less than thirty (30) days, delivering a draft report describing survey results and recommendations for next steps to the GNSO Council. -- Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.org +1 914-374-0613 Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html https://www.chillingeffects.org/ https://www.torproject.org/ http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/