All,

Avri and I just wanted to provide an update to the Working Group on the Geographic Names Sessions on Tuesday and Thursday @ICANN 59.

ICANN has retained the services of David Fairman and Julia Golomb from Consensus Building Institute (CBI) to help facilitate the Geographic Names sessions @ ICANN 59 and possibly beyond.  In preparation for those sessions, they will be reaching out to those that submitted proposals for the April Webinar as well as several community members to get some background on all of the various positions around this subject.  The purpose of their reaching out to these persons is strictly for their own education and to help them understand the complexities of the subject matter.  They believe, and we agree, that getting that background will provide for much more fruitful discussions.

CBI (a non-profit collaboration and dispute resolution organization based in the US, www.cbuilding.org) is assisting us in preparing and facilitating the Johannesburg ICANN59 cross community sessions. As a reminder, the goal of the sessions @ICANN59 is to clarify key geo names at the top level  policy issues, build a shared understanding of community interests and concerns, develop options that could gain broad community support, and start down a path to consensus on a comprehensive proposal that can be accepted by the ICANN Community.

In preparation for ICANN 59, we are asking that everyone review the materials that we plan to present for discussion at the sessions:

· background document: https://community.icann.org/download/attachments/64077479/Geo%20Names%20Webinar%20Background%20Paper.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1492716976000&api=v2

· summary of proposals from community members: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sKx_vyFhhscBUyaFMwqirj8r1D6g7IFtUSa9-lnk2ZI/edit?usp=sharing; and

· co-chairs’ draft additional compromise strawperson: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m69loOZthxrQdcCj1dIUJLkezQXr9rwGxXrechdFv1Y/edit?usp=sharing.

Because of the limited amount of time for these sessions, we are not going to be having a panel rehash the same presentations that were discussed during the webinar.  We are therefore asking that everyone come prepared.  We especially would like to call some attention to the last document referenced above (the Co-Chairs’ draft additional compromise strawperson).  After spending some time reviewing all of the proposals, Avri and I have tried to draft a Strawperson that includes a number of elements from most of the proposals we saw.  We could not draw from every proposal since some of them were diametrically opposed to each other.

That said, this is just a strawperson and not a proposal.  Avri and I are not advocates for this document, but we would be happy to answer any questions as to why the draft says what it says.  The sole purpose of putting this strawperson together is to stimulate conversation beyond the discussions that have taken place so far.  We understand that there are some very strong held positions by many members of the community, but we hope that by putting this together, we can hopefully stimulate discussion on potential compromises. 

Please let us know if you have any questions and feel free to forward this note to your constituencies, stakeholder groups, advisory committees, etc.

Sincerely,

Avri Doria and Jeff Neuman

Subsequent Procedures PDP Co-Chairs