Dear Sub Team Members, Please see below the action items and discussion notes captured by staff from the meeting on 29 September. These high-level notes are designed to help Work Track Sub Team members navigate through the content of the call and are not meant to be a substitute for the recording. Please also see the recording on the meetings page at: https://community.icann.org/display/NGSPP/Work+Track+4+Meetings. Best regards, Julie Julie Hedlund, Policy Director Action Items/Discussion Notes 29 September 1.  Update from WG Activities Discussion Notes: Jeff Neuman: · Sent a letter to GNSO Council on Board letter to the Council on whether we could bifurcate some matters and launching in parallel a new round.  We notified the Council that we did not come to consensus.  The GNSO Council will discuss today, 29 September. · Each Work Tracks have started on substantive matters and items to give to staff to research. 2.  Brief Review of Meeting #2 and any action items Discussion Notes: Cheryl Langdon-Orr: · First thing: generate outreach questions SOs/ACs, GNSO SGs and Cs.  A number of different work tracks are hoping to have outreach questions, so helpful if there could be one coordinated letter.   However, our questions need to go early in the process and if there is undue delay from other Work Track Sub Teams it shouldn't hold us up. · Look at other drafting as response to the action items from our last meeting: Steve Chan: · Staff reached out to internal colleagues re: score cards and to the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG). · Helpful to have specific questions for GDD and UASG.   Need to understand the scope that we want to ask. · UASG noted that their work is generally outward facing, but willing to participate, but specific questions would be helpful. Jeff Neuman:  · Did the questions asked of the applicants provide the information that the evaluators were looking for -- probably note as there were clarifying questions.  · Need guidance on how can we revise the questions to avoid having to go back with clarifying questions?  · How can we assist future evaluators and make the process more streamlined?  · Don't have enough information about the process to ask specific questions. Rubens Kuhl: · The initiate questions were public, but when clarifying questions were issued they were not published.  · There is a lot of information that could be used to improve the process. Steve Chan: ICANN staff did release a number of Applicant Advisories in regards to problematic questions -- something that we can work with in the interim. 3. Discussion of Specific Questions for JAS Advisors Action Item: Rubens Kuhl will put the questions into a Google Doc. Discussion Notes: Rubens Kuhl:  Possible outreach to JAS Advisors -- role in quality control, back up evaluator, framework for name collisions.  Here are draft questions: Application Quality Control · “In your role of quality control for the 2012-round application evaluation, what suggestions you have for improving the application process that you would like the community to consider ?” Name Collisions · “In your role of developing the framework and analysis to respond for the namespace collisions issue, what general guidance would you like the community to consider for the next round ?” · “Among the 3 strings not recommended to move forward (.home, .corp and .mail), we can classify them in two groups: ones without much dotless queries (.home and .corp) and one with prevalence of dotless queries (.mail). Considering dotless operation is forbidden in gTLDs, could you clarify why the later group presented a collision risk as well ?” · “Were there non-applied for strings that would fall into one of those two risk profiles that would be suggested to not be allowed for the time being in subsequent new gTLD procedures ?” Rubens Kuhl: DNS Stability Review looked at IDNs. There were no language generation rules at that time.  Name collisions were not part of that.  4. Specific Outreach Questions Action Items: 1. Sub Team members should think up and propose additional questions.  But we don’t want to create the world's longest survey.  Need to make it easy.  Use letter approach to UASG and survey approach for community questions. 2. CLO and Rubens: Put into Google Forms as a collaborative tool in comment mode. Principle B; Recommendation 18; Principles D, E and F; Recommendations 4, 7, and 8; General 1. Consider how to encourage adoption of gTLDs. · Internationalized Domain Names and Universal Acceptance – Coordinate with UASG Questions to pose. 2. Evaluate whether rules around IDNs properly accounted for recommendations from IDN WG. 3. Determine and address policy guidance needed for the implementation of IDN variant TLDs. · Security and Stability: a. Were the proper questions asked to minimize the risk to the DNS and ensure that applicants will be able to meet their obligations in the registry agreement? b. Should there be non-scored questions and if so, how should they be presented? c. Were the proper criteria established to avoid causing technical instability? d. Is the impact to the DNS from new gTLDs fully understood? Applicant Reviews: Technical/Operational and Financial: · Were Financial and Technical criteria designed properly to allow applicants to demonstrate their capabilities while allowing evaluators to validate their capabilities? a. How can the criteria be streamlined and made clearer? Rubens Kuhl:  Just noting that most of these are very open-ended so we'll probably get answers that go in opposite directions or answer different things. Cheryl Langdon-Orr: · Look for example "Consider how to encourage adoption of gTLDs" -- ideal to ask the respondent to react to a statement with a scale of 1-7 avoiding neutrality.  Same could apply to other issues.  · Could use Google Forms.  Also for a matrix response -- pose a set of statements that could be the antithesis of what you are asking.  Could use survey-style materials. Jeff Neuman – Additional Questions: 1. On IDNs:  Should we allow single character IDN in nthose languages where a single character an denote a full word or phrase? (eg., Chinese, Japanese Korean)? 2. Should IDNs continue to be prioritized over AScII applications as was done in the 2012 round? 3. Should applicants be required to DEMONSTRATE their ability to meet the technical requirements prior to an application being accepted (as opposed to afterwards through PDT testing)? 4. If yes to above, is there even a need to have "predelegation testing" 5. If there is a pre-approval process for RSPs, what questions would need to be asked of applicants in that pre-approval process vs. what is asked in the application process itself? 6. Should there be a question asked of RSPs that asks about the number of TlDs that they currently support or will support in the future?  And if so, how should that play into the evaluation (in terms of scale) Rubens Kuhl: 2012-round prevented IDN Variant TLDs to be delegated, even for the same registry operator. This WT will have to look into whether this is still should be the policy, or if it is to be changed, what policy would need to apply to such variants (such as .quebec and .québec), like a TLD bundling (like what is done with variant IDNs SLDs in some TLDs, or like what is done with .ngo and .ong on a TLD level), or they could exist free of any agreement-imposed restriction (even though registry policy could specify similar restrictions). 5. Next Call: 13 October at 0300 UTC.