My concern is prioritizing at the Council level. Managing the policy process should include some consideration of time and resource management. That will naturally allow Staff to prioritize, or as Philip suggested, allow us to direct Staff appropriately on priority of the work we've asked for. Tim -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [council] Action Item related to Whois Service Requirements From: Stéphane Van Gelder <stephane.vangelder@indom.com> Date: Wed, April 08, 2009 3:52 am To: Philip Sheppard <philip.sheppard@aim.be>, "'GNSO Council'" <council@gnso.icann.org> I'm in a kind of half-way house about all this. On the one hand, I fully support Tim's comments that prioritising our work may lead to us actually getting things done. On the other, I do feel that it's our responsibility as GNSO Council to try and tackle all the important issues that lie before us, not just some of them. There's been a great deal of talk about volunteer burn-out since Mexico, and the fact that we find ourselves at the limit of what we can handle should be of great worry to the ICANN community as a whole. That's certainly an issue there that needs to be addressed. However, I do think Avri's motion on WHOIS is worthwhile having, just as I consider new gTLD work and GNSO improvement work crucial. Having staff alert us when they can no longer cope may be one way of dealing with the sheer volume of issues to be tackled by the GNSO Council. It implies that we rely on staff more and more to simplify our lives for us, which is no bad thing... Unless staff finds itself unable to cope with that (but they haven't sent us that signal so far I don't think). But I agree that the order in which we should do things is for us to initiate work on an issue, and then for staff to give us the timeframe in which they can reasonably be expected to handle that issue and the work we put their way on that issue. Checking with staff before we embark on something seems like taking something away from our role as the people responsible for setting things in motion as far as the issues the GNSO handles is concerned. Stéphane Le 08/04/09 09:23, « Philip Sheppard » <philip.sheppard@aim.be> a écrit :

Chuck wrote: "Maybe we should start by asking Staff whether they have the bandwidth to take this on at this time and if not request an estimate as to when they think they would be able to do so".

--------------------- Chuck, this seems a little backwards and implies every current issue occupying staff time has greater priority than future ideas such as this. A better way to proceed is for Council to make as many requests of staff as we deem necessary. Staff management then respond and indicate resource constraints. They list the activities they are doing and request Council to prioritise the list. We prioritise. Staff act.

Philip