Over in the thread about the communities RFP [1], some of us have been discussing how many proposals the ICG should request and expect. We also discussed this in London. My feeling is that as far as full community proposals — i.e., documents that contain all five sections of the latest RFP proposal [2], fully completed — we should be open to receiving either 3 proposals (names, numbers, protocol parameters) or 4 proposals (gTLDs, ccTLDs, numbers, protocol parameters).
From all the discussions I’ve had with ccTLD folks, it seems as though both their current arrangements and what they may potentially propose for post-transition arrangements could differ from what gets proposed for gTLDs (although not necessarily in incompatible ways). I think we should be open to this possibility. Of course, we would expect the ccTLD community and the gTLD community to work together to try to align themselves on areas of overlap, in the same way that we expect all of the other communities to do so. And our preference would still be for 3 proposals rather than 4.
Saying that we should be open to accepting 3 or 4 full proposals is *not* the same as saying we should be open to receiving 10 or 20, where any stakeholder can submit a full proposal. I don’t think this would be productive, and I don’t know what we as the ICG would do with proposals that do not come from the operational communities. Of course, we want individual stakeholders to be able to provide input and feedback, and I think we’ve done a good job of outlining our expectations as far as how that will work in the charter. But soliciting input is different from soliciting a full proposal for any of the functions — those should come from the operational communities. This leaves the case Milton has pointed out, where an operational community splits into two or three groups that produce separate proposals for the same function. Again, this is not ideal, and I think we should set the expectation that we want to receive at most 1 proposal from each operational community (with the caveat above about ccTLDs vs. gTLDs). If it turns out that we get two or three proposals for the same function from different factions of the same community, we’ll have to deal with that then (I don’t know how), but the expectation we should set from the outset is for uniformity within each community. One way to smooth over the potential faction problem would be to build on one of the requirements we already have in the RFP (Section V), which is for the communities to provide an assessment of the consensus level and a description of areas of contention or disagreement. If a particular community develops a minority faction with a counter-proposal to what the rest of the community proposes, it could be documented there (and we would probably want to elaborate that better in the RFP). But I think this would only work if the counter-proposal could be viewed as a minority opinion, and I’m not sure if that’s a plausible scenario for any of the communities. Thoughts? I mostly want to jump start this discussion among the names folks, as I expect it to be fairly straightforward the protocol parameters community to produce a single proposal, and the same for numbers. Thanks, Alissa [1] http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/internal-cg/2014-August/000869.html [2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/ztrzblyax0540m5/IANA%20Transition%20RFP%20v07%20%2 8ALC-MM%29.docx