During today's plenary call, the RT decided to accept Theresa Swineheart's offer and request that the RDS-WHOIS2 Review be removed from the Public Comment on Short-Term Options to Adjust the Timeline for Specific Reviews. Although I am not sure that the decision can be viewed as consensus using the rule-of-thumb of 80%, it was definitely a majority decision. The group did consider the issue raised by Chris. Specifically to what extent would we be viewed in a bad light for cutting off comment on our work. There was a strong belief that we are doing this for good reasons and that presuming the team members go back to our home constituencies and explain what we are doing, in balance, this is the right decision. This is not in final form, but and identification of the major points to get review team closure. I am not looking for word-smithing but rather any issues misstated of missing. I would like to have a draft ready by Wednesday, so please review this as soon as possible. ----------- Letter sent to Theresa Swineheart on beheld of the RDS-WHOIS2-RT and also posted to the Public Comment. The rationale that we will use to make this request is based on our belief that once a number of inaccuracies and misrepresentations are corrected, there is little to be gained at this point from altering the scope or pausing the review. There are some review team members and others in the community who believed that this review should have been deferred, or its scope restricted to just a review of the first WHOIS RT's Recommendations. That was thoroughly discussed prior to the review and during the scoping phase. Ultimately, it was decided that the review must continue and should not be restricted. That was many months ago and we cannot turn back the clock but must look at today's situation, and where we will be when the Public Comment (PC) completes in July. = The Review Terms of Reference (ToR) does state that due to GDPR, we MAY defer some aspects of the review which we did not believe would substantially alter our completion target. In fact, we have not deferred anything at this point and now believe that GDPR will have a significant impact on our work. The full implementation of GDPR may or may not be understood by the time we deliver our report, but we will certainly understand the overall direction and that will be a factor in our report. It is clear that the real impact will not be well understood by then nor even a few months later, so the analysis of that will have to wait for a subsequent review. = The document implies that because there are only ten RT members, there are insufficient people to do the work. In fact there are just ten members, but all are working together and the number of active workers may well exceed the number of active workers on previous larger teams. = The PC document says that $460k will be saved in FY19 by restricting the scope of the review and that $590k will be saved by pausing the review. The review team has not been involved in estimating any of these budgets and does not believe that they are accurate. [Financial Analysis here] = The public comment is due to close on 06 July 2018 with the staff report due on 23 Jul7 2018. According to the current Review Team work plan, the Review Team is scheduled to have a face to face meeting 19-20 July 2018. Our intent is that we finalize the content of our draft report at that time. Moreover, unlike some draft reports which are comprised of many questions to the community, we believe that this will really be a draft report looking for community comment before finalizing it. It makes little sense for the group to reduce its scope or completely pause just at the point when it is ready to deliver its draft report. By that time, the bulk of the work will have been done, and to scrap part of it or pause for a year implies much of that work will have to largely be repeated again later. The RT specifically notes that Option C, to have the Review paused in April (a date that had long past when the PC was issued) made no sense whatsoever given that the community input to make that decision would only be available in late July. The Review Team believes that if it had been consulted when this Public Comment was being contemplated and developed, the RDS-WHOIS2 Review would never have been included. Moreover, the Review Team strongly believes that if a RT is to be held accountable for keeping to its "budget" (as is the current practice), the RT MUST be involved in developing that overall budget and the annual FY budgets that it must operationally adhere to.