http://gnso.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-18jul13-en.htm

Call for Volunteers: GNSO Policy & Implementation Working Group

In brief

The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council seeks volunteers to serve on a Working Team that has been tasked to address a number of issues that have been raised in the context of the recent discussions on policy & implementation that affect the GNSO.

What This Working Group Will Do

The Working Group is tasked to provide the GNSO Council with a set of recommendations on:

1.      A set of principles that would underpin any GNSO policy and implementation related discussions, taking into account existing GNSO Operating Procedures.

2.      A process for developing gTLD policy, perhaps in the form of “Policy Guidance”, including criteria for when it would be appropriate to use such a process (for developing policy other than “Consensus Policy”) instead of a GNSO Policy Development Process;

3.      A framework for implementation related discussions associated with GNSO Policy Recommendations;

4.      Criteria to be used to determine when an action should be addressed by a policy process and when it should be considered implementation, and;

5.      Further guidance on how GNSO Implementation Review Teams, as defined in the PDP Manual, are expected to function and operate.

For further details on the charter, please see http://gnso.icann.org/en/drafts/policy-implementation-charter-04jul13-en.pdf.

How This Working Group Will Work

ICANN Working Groups use transparent, open processes. The meetings of this WG will be recorded, and the recordings will be available to the public. The mailing list for the Working Group will be archived publicly. Working Group members are expected to submit Statements of Interest (SOI). The group will collaborate using a public workspace. The Working Group is expected to follow the GNSO Working Group Guidelines.

How to Join

The GNSO Council invites all interested parties to put forward their names so they can be added to the WG mailing list. The WG will be open to anyone interested to join. Community members who wish to be invited to join the group should contact the GNSO secretariat (gnso.secretariat@icann.org).

Background

Mainly as a result of discussions stemming from implementation related issues of the new gTLD program, there is increased focus on which topics call for policy and which call for implementation work, including which processes should be used, at what time and how diverging opinions should be acted upon. In order to facilitate these discussions, ICANN Staff developed a draft framework for community discussion that identifies a number of steps and criteria that might facilitate dealing with similar questions in the future. The paper identifies a number of questions that the community may want to consider further in this context, as well as a couple of suggested improvements that could be considered in the short term. While developing a bright-line rule as to what is policy or implementation may not be possible, the hope is that by developing clear processes and identifying clear roles and responsibilities for the different stakeholders, it will become easier to deal with these issues going forward and allow for broad participation and involvement. Following several discussions by the GNSO Council on this topic, the GNSO Council has now formed a Working Group which has been tasked to provide concrete recommendations on how to address some of these issues from a GNSO perspective.

Glen de Saint Géry
GNSO Secretariat
gnso.secretariat@gnso.icann.org
http://gnso.icann.org