Patrick, I honestly don't know enough about the public comments handling process to be able to respond intelligently. It was not one (of the many) things that I looked at when I was on the Board, although I did flag it when I was on the Board's Public Participation Committee as something that I thought should be looked at, because it did seem to me to be very "Vogon" (1) style communication, and that it would benefit from an effective reach-out process whenever anything was published for public comment. Perhaps we could have a chat off-line about this ? I understood that work was being done to review the whole public comment process, but I have no idea where that has got to. Dennis (1) "There's been a sign on Alpha Centauri for the last millennium, why did you not read it ?!" On 06/01/2012 10:46, Patrik Fältström wrote:
On 6 jan 2012, at 11:05, Dennis Jennings wrote:
I know that many people, including yourself, feel strongly about many of the IDN Variant issues, and I very much appreciate your continuing support for the VIP Project.
Dennis, this conclusion is correct, but let me because of this also bring up another issue regarding a very big flaw in the way ICANN handle public comments.
The comments are to be submitted to a webpage, without any requirement for feedback or *discussion* what so ever.
This have during the years lead to people simply not submitting comments, but instead repeatedly asking ICANN how to send in comments, or claim that it was impossible to comment or participate.
The lack of ability to *discuss* the various issues is something that ICANN must start to take very serious.
Just look at the gTLD process, or more specifically two examples I would like to rise:
1. The JIG report that due to the lack of discussion was what I claim "blocked". Specifically regarding one-character TLD. After about a year or so delay, ICANN board did ask the ACs for comments, and yes, SSAC is working on a response. If the responses from the ACs are _very_different_ from the findings in the JIG report, what kind of conclusions can then be drawn under the review of the AOC regarding requirement of openness?
2. The discussions regarding confusability as part of the feedback loop during the IDN ccTLD fast track resulted in a board resolution that says more or less that it is ok to delegate confusingly similar TLDs if it is to the same registry. That is a board resolution that has been taken and as far as I know, none of the ACs where asked for input. There is an interesting discussion going on whether one or more of the ACs must point out that that decision by the board was most certainly premature, and that the advice (that still could have been ignored by the board of course) could have been to be more careful from the ACs.
I certainly hope that none of these two examples will lead to any large problems, but I at the same time do not want to have this report end up being one that for example SSAC must at least discuss internally if we should do a detailed review of and come to our own conclusions that we submit to the board -- and in the mean time we ask the board to not draw any conclusions from it.
I am just nervous how the participants of for example SSAC will react when we will discuss this report.
If they are ok with the process, we can move on, if not, we look at a delay of a year or so.
Patrik
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