Below please find a draft note to the Board asking for their cooperation in our surveys.
Let me know what you think. I welcome edits.
Sorry for releasing this so close to the meeting - I agonised a bitt to much over it, which is why it needs editing.
Dear Tripti:
The GNSO Council has formed a small group to study the “Board Readiness” of Council policy recommendations, with the aim to adjust our policy development practices in a way that will increase the likelihood that GNSO policy recommendations will
be readily adopted by the ICANN Board.
On behalf of that team, I am writing to solicit the cooperation and participation of Board members in a series of interviews the small team will conduct. The information coming from the interviews will be used to build a set of hypotheses that,
once tested, will point to improvements in the policy process. We plan for the interviews to be conducted in informal, one-on-one formats. Questions can be provided in advance but the conversation might take the interview is different directions.
We will study several past PDPs and might ask one or more Board members who participated in the Board deliberations to join in an interview.
To provide a bit more background: the team will develop questionnaires for interviews with Policy Development Process (PDP) Chairs, PDP working group members, ICANN staff, and Board members to develop information needed to identify a new set of
practices in the Policy Development Process.
The questionnaire content will be developed based on the considerations such as:
- Were PDP working group members surprised (or unsurprised) by Board rejection of certain, specific policy recommendations? Why?
- During the policy-making discussion, did the PDP working group consider Board reaction to potential recommendations (either by the Board liaison or the public comment process)?
- In the opinion of PDP working group members / ICANN staff / the Board. did the PDP working group believe they had sufficient information to develop a “Board-ready” set of recommendations?
- What are the expectations of the Board liaison role by: the PDP working group members, the Board liaisons, the Board? What are the effects of differences in those expectations?
- How did Board members receive information regarding PDP working group progress, during the Policy Development Process and after recommendations were received?
- What (negatively or positively) surprised Board members in the policy recommendations? At what stage of the PDP did those surprises occur? Through what channel (reading PDP report, reading summary report, Board liaison report) did the Board member
receive the specific information?
The small team will synthesise the interview responses into a set of findings and either, create some follow-up inquiries or, use the findings to develop a set of recommendations intended to inform Council work on improving Board readiness.
We think this approach might enable us to eliminate some gaps or disconnects in the thinking of the PDP participants and halos fashion a smoother running process, i.e., Turing the PDP process into more of a continuum, rather than discreet steps.
The small team participants have quite a bit of enthusiasts for this approach and hope you and the Board cans ee their way to cooperating with this effort.
Thanks for taking the time to consider this. We stand by to answer any questions.