In response to lots of member input received over the last several weeks in oral comments, chat comments and email messages, the Leadership Team decided to make some adjustments to our near-term Work Plan.  The first main agenda item for our upcoming WG meeting on Tuesday, April 25, will be an explanation of the changes and an opportunity for questions. The first attachment to this message contains three slides that show the next steps in our Work Plan with the changes.

The main change is to move ahead now to Task 12.b, first pass deliberation on the Gated Access Charter question for thin data elements.  After Task 12.b we will return to Task 12.a followed by Task 12.c (first pass on the Users/Purposes, Data Elements, and Privacy Charter questions for thick data elements) and Task 12.d (first pass on the Gated Access Charter questions for thick data elements).

Note that slide 3 shows estimated start times for Tasks 12.a through Task 13.a (Start Preparation of the First Initial Report) at ICANN60 in October.

After we describe the Work Plan changes in our WG meeting on the 25th and allow for any questions, the next agenda item will be to start Task 12.b on Gated Access.  To allow members to prepare for that a new section to our Key Concepts Deliberation Working Draft document was been prepared and attached.  Please review that in advance of our meeting this coming Tuesday and come prepared to discuss the second Gated Access Charter sub-question: “Should gTLD registration ‘thin data’ be entirely public or should access be controlled?”  In that regard:

• Some excerpts from the EWG Report are included as a starting point for discussion.
• Members are encouraged to review written answers from the European Data Protection experts to applicable questions we asked them and share any relevant elements.
• Members are also encouraged to provide relevant information from other sources that may differ or amplify that from the DP experts.

Finally, let me say that the Leadership Team is going to do everything we can to speed up our progress and meet the timeline shown in the first attachment.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation.