The following appeal has been submitted to the NC Intake Committee:Pursuant to
the adoption of the DRAFT Rules of Procedure for the DNSO Names Council, v2 on February
26, wherein it is stipulated that, "Any of the following persons can make proposals
for NC agenda items by e-mail to nc-intake@dnso.org :," and that such persons include
"members of the General Assembly (GA) defined as subscribers to the ga@dnso.org,
announce@dnso.org or the GA voting register", and whereas I, Danny Younger, as a
member of Review Working Group and as an individual listed in the GA voting register,
meet the above criteria, I make the following proposal for an NC agenda item:
Reconsideration of the Timeline of the Review Working Group - an amendment to Decision
D2.
Reasons for this request: When the DNSO Mailing List
was activated for the initial members of the Review Working Group, all of us were
presented with the following preliminary sets of messages:
DNSO Mailling
lists archives
[wg-review] Chronological Index
2000 Dec 19 [wg-review]
Welcome to wg-review@dnso.org mailing list DNSO
Listadmin
2000 Dec 23 [wg-review] Review WG Membership YJ Park
[wg-review] We are in the starting line...... YJ Park
The very first introductory salutation originated with the List Administrator,
followed by greetings from the Working Group Chair, Ms. YJ Park. Our
Chair in her second message "We are in the starting line..." detailed our Terms of
Reference (version 0.3). After outlining objectives, authority, procedures
and approaches, and administrative information, the lifetime of the Review Working
Group was stipulated:
Dec. 19 - open end : Call for Participation in this WG
Dec.
19 - Dec. 30 : WG Charter Discussion
Dec. 31 : WG Charter Finalization
Dec.
31 - Mar. : WG's Interim Report - March Melbourne
June Stockholm: Submission
to NC as WG's position under
assumption that it can find consensus.
As
every one of the 250+ members of this Working Group have read, and agreed to abide
by the mandate delineated in the Terms of Reference provided to us, we are of the
view that our agreed-upon lifespan extended until the Stockholm meeting in June.
The following individuals also participated in list discussions at the onset of
our Working Group mission and most assuredly read the introductory Terms of Reference
provided by Ms. Park:
Peter de Blanc, Karl Auerbach, Milton Mueller, Ken Stubbs,
Philip Sheppard,
None of these individuals, nor any other member of either the
Names Council or the Review Task Force who (presumably in their capacity as managers
of the consensus-building process) were following the work of the Review WG, raised
their voice to object to the stated timeline in the Terms of Reference so clearly
presented to the Working Group at the start of its efforts.
Collective silence
is a tacit admission that it is acceptable to proceed on the basis of any given document;
this principle was last demonstrated by the Review Task Force when on February 17,
the NCRTF Report was submitted to the Board subsequent to the absence of follow-up
comments on the part of Task Force members.
This Review Working Group has from
the very beginning cooperated with the Review Task Force, extending an inordinate
amount of effort through a busy Holiday Season to provide the RTF with a well-drafted
preliminary report on January 15th so that the Task Force could meet its own set
of self-imposed time restraints. Since January 15, this cooperation has
not been returned in kind.
When we review the record of Task Force activities
over the course of the last six months, we are appalled by the obvious conclusion
that the RTF has done little more than generate a questionnaire which garnered a
mere handful of comments, and we are sickened by the efforts being made to terminate
the life of a Working Group which by contrast, has taken its mandate seriously (has
generated close to 3000 comments) and continues to strive to fulfill the mandate
established by the Board - a review of the DNSO leading to recommendations for improvement
in both procedures and structure.
One would think that an organization whose stated
purpose is the management of the consensus-building process would value the hard
work and dedication to a noble goal that has been evinced by this Working Group,
that such an organization would respect the concept of presenting both majority and
minority opinions and would thereby have no fear of divergent streams of thought
being presented to the Board. One would think that the Names Council would
want to encourage participation, outreach, and well-considered bottoms-up consensus
conclusions. Instead, we seem to be seeing the DNSO gradually becoming irrelevant
as an institution, as more and more policy decisions are being made by an ICANN staff
that drafts policy within the context of contracts and determines procedures without
recourse to the DNSO. All of this has happened because the Names Council has
failed to properly marshal its resources to do the best possible job in formulating
policy recommendations.
The Review Working Group is one of your best resources;
it is a group committed to the premise that change is warranted and that the ICANN
Board deserves the best that our collective minds can offer. We cannot abide
by RTF recommendations for additional study at a time when actual solutions are at
hand. The Names Council needs to prove that the DNSO is not an irrelevant body,
that true consensus-based policy recommendations can be made in a timely manner.
The Names Council needs to allow us to finish the job we started. It is for
our mutual benefit and for the benefit of the Corporation.
I ask you to honor the
above-cited Terms of Reference and to allow us to complete our work on your behalf.
Decision D2 should be revisited. There is room for both a Task Force Report
and for a Working Group Summary Presentation. We are a family in our
mutual endeavors; I ask you to mend the rift that has been created.