Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Wendy Seltzer wrote:
Rule 12.2 -- I don't think a quorum should persist after members leave a meeting. There's already too great a tendency for ICANN meetings to drag on.
I'll respectfully disagree, only because I've seen instances where a bathroom break has lead to a flurry of pushing through something that the person(s) temporarily absent didn't want. This is certainly a worst-case ill-will scenario but I have seen it happen.
The flip side is that people, fed up with a meeting's progress, walk in order to break quorum and render the rest of the meeting impotent. While this is also undesirable, even less desirable is giving the remaining people the ability to push through votes without legitimate mandate. In any case, any of these situations indicates a poisoned atmosphere that needs to be corrected anyway.
What about a compromise re: quorum, e.g., where a meeting is scheduled for a definite time period, members leaving after the end of that time period will not be counted in the quorum. --Wendy
Look at the discussions we've had internally in NA about even the role of abstentions. I don't think that any agreement achieved without a quorum can be legitimately considered a consensus.
Working with documents: The committee should delegate the drafting and re-drafting of documents to a secretariat or subcommittee, which should not attempt to make substantive decisions without the group, but should use list alternatives that have some support in [brackets] for the group as a whole to discuss and resolve.
Agreed. Of course, this process assumes that people who would (and should) offer various alternative ideas should speak out during the formative stage, and it was my impression that ALAC preparatory work was lacking. I guess it would be up to the drafting subcommittee to suitably poke the committee members for comment in advance, so that objections aren't all heard at the last minute.
- Evan
-- Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.org phone: +1.914.374.0613 Visiting Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html http://www.chillingeffects.org/