[gnso-irtp-pdp-jun08] highlights of the process-flow call today

["Mike O'Connor" <mike@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Here's my attempt to summarize the conversation we had today.  *Very* 
interesting and informative.
-- Process flow diagrams

Many thanks to Marika for pulling together several examples of 
transfer process-flow diagrams.  I started a page on the wiki and 
posted them there;
https://st.icann.org/irtp_jun08_pdp-wg/index.cgi?process_diagrams

-- Customer-facing vs back-office process flows

We realized that there is a difference between the process that's 
presented to customers and the actual activity behind the 
scenes.   We agreed that it would be helpful to find a few examples 
of the back-office processes, if they can be obtained without 
divulging the secret sauce of a registrar.  Several folks have agreed 
to go off and see what they can come up with.
-- Thick-registry and thin-registry back office processes are 
different - WHOIS vs EPP
We discovered that there are really two different kinds of 
back-office processes at work.  In the case of a thin registry (one 
that doesn't maintain any registrant information) the back-office 
processes rely on WHOIS as the vehicle to share information between 
gaining and losing registrars.  We think (and are verifying) that 
WHOIS is *not* used in thick registries -- in that case the glue 
between the two registrars is the registry's EPP-based system.
-- There is substantial variation in both customer-facing and 
back-office processes
We note that there are differences between registry processes 
(especially in the ccTLDs) and their implementations of EPP.
We note that the WHOIS implementations vary between registrars (e.g. 
differences in the way that throttling is applied to WHOIS)
We explored the difference in "customer" terminology in the 
customer-facing flows that we looked at -- there are varying 
references to "customer", "administrative contact",  "registrant", 
"user" etc.  There's the possibility that confusion will arise 
(although we didn't agree on this point).
-- There may be a "fork" in our discussion about sharing email addresses

We are tentatively thinking that the issue of sharing registrant 
email address may be moot in the case of a thick registry, because 
EPP-based systems already have automation in place to do this.  The 
issue may only apply to thin registries, which imply that registrars 
have to rely on WHOIS queries to share this kind of 
information.  Several of us are off finding out more about this.
A great time was had by all.

Thanks!

m



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