Hi everybody,
I hope you all had a great holiday season and are ready to return to work constructing a new and improved CEP! We’ll have our first call of the new year later today at 13:00 UTC and hopefully we can start making some real progress.
At our last meeting I was charged with two tasks: 1) confer with David McAuley to determine whether the conciliation phase of the IRP and the CEP might inadvertently create a situation of accountability paralysis by duplicating efforts and 2) to ask the plenary for guidance concerning what exactly it is we want the CEP to do.
As to the former, David and I agreed to keep in touch during the process but there does not appear to be a problem here. The IRP-IOT had not done much with conciliation to date but David envisioned it more as an informal encouragement for the sides to work out their differences rather than as any sort of formal procedure, such as a mediation session within the IRP.
I presented to the CCWG plenary meeting number 9 a synopsis of our discussions to date focusing on the mediation versus conciliation versus negotiation process decision. There was some concern about needing to revise the Bylaws if we were to go to a more formal mediation procedure, but there seemed to be agreement that changing the Bylaws should not be an impediment if that was what we wanted to do.
There was a building consensus within the plenary that our approach should be neither a formal mediation nor an informal negotiation but rather something that was termed a “structured negotiation”, a negotiation facilitated by a third party. There was also a view that we should try to take a look at past experiences, case studies if you will, to build upon what we’ve done before with the CEP.
I’ve attempted to get some information from ICANN Legal about what type of documentation, if any, we could obtain about past CEP’s but they have yet to respond to my request. We were also promised by Legal, at our first meeting, a list of past community members who have participated in CEP’s. That, too, has not been received. Hopefully after today’s meeting we’ll be able to ask more specifically for data from Legal that can help us going forward and it will be delivered.
My hope today is that we can have a discussion about the concept of a “structured negotiation” approach to the CEP that was suggested during the plenary, accept or reject, and if the former better define the concept. In addition, if we want to proceed with examining past experiences with the current CEP to better inform our future CEP design, an approach to obtaining the data needed should be developed.
I look forward to speaking with everyone later today.
Kind Regards,
Ed Morris
