This is the Tenth Topical E-mail on outstanding questions being “put to the list.”  This covers the question of overall scoring to pass CPE  (Topic 34)

Remember:  We are down to the wire on this, so unless you have a VERY strong objection to these, we will put these into the document.  If you do have a big issue with the responses to these (all of which were previously discussed and in emails over the past 1.5 months), please let us know ASAP.  Only comments that provide the rationale for the objection with proposed replacement text to address the specific outstanding questions will now be considered.

Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I. Current Applicant Guidebook Language:  “An application must score at least 14 points to prevail in a community priority evaluation.”

II. Issue:  Some commenters to the Draft Final Report, including the ALAC, Infonetworks, Swiss Government, fTLD Registry Services supported lowering the threshold from 14 out of 16 points (approx. 88%) to 12 out of 16 points (75%).  However, it should be noted that during our discussions, not everyone supported the lowering of the threshold.

III. Discussion Points

1. We have recommended a number of changes already to CPE, including more transparency, more flexibility to recognize non-economic based communities, increased scrutinization of letters of opposition, more involvement in the selection process of evaluators, etc.  These changes should go a long way to mitigate the issues faced in 2012.

2. That said, the current scoring framework was rigid and required a perfect or nearly perfect scoring on every evaluation criteria.  As we observed, very few applications were able to achieve community status.

3. On the other hand, merely lowering the scoring down to 12 (from 14) would only have resulted in one additional application during the 2012 round achieving Community Priority.

4. Finally, even if we lower the threshold to an actual number, leaves little flexibility to implement a new scoring mechanism (should the ICANN community desire such a new mechanism) which encompasses all of the policy changes we have recommended.

IV. Proposal:  Given the Working Group’s affirmation of the importance of the prioritization of community-based applications, and subject to all of the Recommendations and Implementation Guidance set forth in this Report, the Working Group urges the Implementation Review Team to consider changing the passing score for achieving community priority status from a hard score of 14 out of 16 points to achieving a score of at least 75-80% of the total available evaluation points.  This not only emphasizes the importance we place on community-based applications, but also provides some flexibility in any future scoring methodology.

Please have your comments (If any) by no later than 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, December 16, 2020.  Absent a strong showing of support on the list for this change, we will default back to the original text in the Draft Final Report.

Jeffrey J. Neuman Founder & CEO JJN Solutions, LLC p: +1.202.549.5079 E: jeff@jjnsolutions.com http://jjnsolutions.com