Hi all, At some point late last year I believe we had a bit of group discussion about how we will actually staff the process of assessing the community proposals as they come in and any issues that may arise from the fact that many of us are both serving on the ICG and have been involved in the community processes. I thought it would be good to confirm that we are generally in agreement about our approach to ensuring that the ICG assessment is conducted in an independent and unbiased fashion even though we all have our own community affiliations and have been involved in the proposal development processes to different extents. To my mind we have many safeguards in place to help us out here: (1) Multitude of proposal reviews As we receive proposals from the communities, my expectation is that we will have many ICG members willing to review them against our assessment criteria.* I think we should aim to have some reviewers for each community proposal who are not affiliated with the community in question and who did not participate in the proposal development process for that community (as well as some who did). I imagine that through mere solicitation of volunteers to review within our group we will achieve this goal, but we should keep an eye out for it in any event. I think this should help to provide a well-rounded assessment of each proposal. (2) Charter limitations Since by our charter we will not be altering the substance of the proposals, I think the danger of any individual ICG member trying to alter the substance of the proposals through the assessment process is quite limited. (3) Transparent proposal development processes In my opinion the proposal development processes and participation in them has been quite transparent. I think it’s easy to find out which of us have been participating in which processes and only a little harder to figure out what we have been advocating for. Because of this, I think it will be fairly clear if any ICG member tries to use the assessment process to achieve some end that did not obtain community consensus. (4) Operating by ICG consensus As a group we decided long ago to operate on a consensus basis, and I think this provides a further defense against any individual ICG member trying to bend the assessment process to achieve his or her own personal objectives. From my perspective the set of safeguards above is plenty robust to ensure that as a group we can conduct a largely objective assessment of the proposals. I would appreciate thoughts about this from the group. As the proposals start to come in I think it will boost the communities’ confidence in us to have this articulated. Thanks, Alissa * https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/iana-transition-assembly-finaliz...