RE: [gnso-osc-ops] Operations Work Team Draft Charter

["Ron Andruff" <randruff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric,

 

Thank you for your thoughtful comments.  I am responding to two in
particular.

 

The first point speaks to: To be consistent with this Reform, the Draft must
find one or more means to extend the standing to participate, to entities
other than Constituencies. Whether this standing to participate is extended
to individuals by invitation or by self-selection, to the appointees of
theNomCom, to stakeholders such as the USG or the IETF, to groups such as
the City TLD group which seek Constituency status, or to the entities
created in the Reform process, such as the OSC to determine independently,
is immaterial. To do otherwise re-arranges the chairs, and the locii of
policy formation, but does not alter the voting calculus based upon seats
held by any useful means, and therefore affects no substantive reform.

 

There are two issues here: The issue of extending standing to entities other
than constituencies; the second, the issue of voting.  Regarding ?standing?
we are referring in the draft proposal to only those bodies that have
current standing with ICANN and are part of the GNSO.  Neither the USG, IETF
or ?City TLDs seeking constituency status? are part of the ?BGC reformed?
GNSO.  With the exception of the wannabe City TLD, the other organizations
have their own places within the ICANN structure.   The WT?s job is not to
consider how to expand the number of entities that can join the GNSO, rather
to deliver high level principles that will guide the operations of the
reformed GNSO.  The appropriate place for the City TLD in waiting, is as an
observer within the Registry Stakeholder Group, i.e. birds of a feather
belong together.  

 

Once a new constituency has been approved by the GNSO and has received Board
recognition, it will then ? and only then ? have standing to lay claim to a
seat at the Policy Council table. Until then, the members of any wannabe
constituency should participate in the ICANN process as the rest of us do,
i.e. through an existing constituency (or for those who prefer, ?stakeholder
group?) that most aligns with their raison d? etre.

 

Now, when the time comes that we have new constituencies ? which in actual
fact will not be ?constituencies? as much as ?participants within a
particular stakeholder group? ? it will be up to that particular stakeholder
group to determine how they will a lot the number votes that their Policy
Councilors will have at Council level.  Or it could possibly by the type of
work that the Policy Council could scope and then manage a Working Group
tasked to resolve the issue.  Once that work has been done, the Council will
vote on the recommendations, as anticipated in the BGC recommendations.
That is to say, the voting aspect is hoped to be significantly diminished as
a result of the consensus process developed at the Working Group level.  The
proof will be in the pudding, as they say.  No one knows today what the
voting element will look like until we have seen the reformed system in
action.

 

In short, contrary to your assertion, I believe that the reform we are
addressing is considerably more than re-arranging the chairs even though it
may appear that way at first glance.

  

Addressing the second issue, i.e. use of labels (constituency or stakeholder
group, or defining a new term), the WT has added two footnotes to the three
page document to clarify that we are using "old" terms simply for the
purpose of clarity for the readers.  In my view, trying to use "new" terms,
when the majority of the community is still wrestling with their own
personal definitions of what those may be, would be antithetical to our
goal.  

 

In conclusion, the objective of the propose draft document ? to be clear ?
is simply to ask the community to give our WT guidance by providing feedback
to the direction we are taking vis-à-vis bifurcating the GNSO leadership
into three bodies within a reformed GNSO.  We have referred to this as
putting up a "kite" to see which direction the larger community takes it so
that, in turn, the WT can determine which direction our work should go to
complete this task.  For this reason, I am recommending that we end the
wordsmithing now and get the proposal out to the community as agreed on our
last call so that we can take the appropriate steps.

 

Finally, as point of order, I would request that the Chair initiate a
dialogue with the Work Team to clarify some rules of conduct regarding
sending out documents that are in development to others outside the WT, as
just occurred with Eric?s post and Dirk Krischenowski | dotBERLIN,.  I am
concerned about sub-dialogues arising outside of the WT about topics that
have yet to be completely clarified within the WT, and which ultimately
could detrimentally impact the very work we are trying to accomplish.

 

Thank you.

 

Kind regards,

 

RA

 

Ronald N. Andruff

RNA Partners, Inc.

220 Fifth Avenue, 20th floor

New York, New York 10001

 

www.rnapartners.com 

V: +1 212 481 2820 x 11

F:  +1 212 481 2859 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gnso-osc-ops@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-gnso-osc-ops@xxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Eric Brunner-Williams
Sent: 2009-04-29 23:35
To: Ray Fassett
Cc: Dirk Krischenowski | dotBERLIN; GNSO Ops Work Team
Subject: RE: [gnso-osc-ops] Operations Work Team Draft Charter

 

Ray,

 

I've written the following to put my prior oral and informal written 

comment on the record, in what I hope is intelligible form.

 

Eric

 

As a preamble to my comments on the Draft Proposal for GNSO 

Organizational Structure, implementing the ICANN Board Recommendation 

that the steps needed to establish the GNSO Council as a "strategic 

manager of the policy process" be identified, I wish to point out that I 

participate in the Operations Work Team (OWT), within the Operations 

Steering Committee (OSC), on behalf of the City TLD group, which seeks 

standing as a Constituency, at the invitation of Rob Hoggarth, ICANN 

staff, arising from action item #3 of the 27 March 2009 meeting of the 

Constituency Operations Team, chaired by NomCom appointee Olga Cavalli.

 

I am employed by CORE, which has an interest in one or more applications 

for City TLDs, but I participate in the OSC and its dependent groups not 

as an employee, nor as an  individual, self-appointed or appointed by 

the NomCom, but as the tasked liaison from an interest group, 

self-governing urban aggregations applying for gTLDs, and co-incident to 

that, seeking standing as a Constituency within the reforming GNSO 

Organizational Structure.

 

That concludes my preamble.

 

The Draft Proposal for GNSO Organizational Structure, "the Draft" 

hereafter, arises from the Board decision taken at Paris to enact the 

reform proposal, which has the goal of transforming the Council from a 

legislative body to a management body, with the policy making moved into 

working groups. Nominally, this change of locus of the highly 

contentious area of policy making from a deadlocked Council, see the 

WHOIS problem area as an example, to working groups will make seats and 

votes and voting blocks less important than it has been during the life 

of the GNSO, and the DNSO before that.

 

As a matter of policy, as the Reform attempts to reduce the incentives 

for Constituencies to view policy through the restrictive lenses of seat 

counts and therefore votes and voting blocks, which has, in my personal 

opinion, reduced two of the original Constituencies to fictions, a view 

supported by the voting analysis data also presented at the Paris 

meeting. To be consistent with this Reform, the Draft must find one or 

more means to extend the standing to participate, to entities other than 

Constituencies. Whether this standing to participate is extended to 

individuals by invitation or by self-selection, to the appointees of 

theNomCom, to stakeholders such as the USG or the IETF, to groups such 

as the City TLD group which seek Constituency status, or to the entities 

created in the Reform process, such as the OSC to determine 

independently, is immaterial. To do otherwise re-arranges the chairs, 

and the locii of policy formation, but does not alter the voting 

calculus based upon seats held by any useful means, and therefore 

affects no substantive reform.

 

The Draft relies upon Constituency as standing to select individuals to 

contribute to bodies. The phrasing is "in representation of their 

respective constituency", Purpose, sentence one, and "comprised of 

officers (representatives) of the different constituencies", 

Description, para 2, final sentence. Note that the second instance is 

specifically for a function which is envisioned is administrative, where 

no cynical and ultimately dysfunctional vote calculus to obtain a policy 

outcome is useful.

 

The taxonomy which the Draft proposes, "Policy Councilors" and 

"Constituency Representatives" and "Executive Committee", all exist 

within the pre-Reform model of Constituencies. At no point does the 

taxonomy of the Draft stray from within the familiar boundaries of 

Constituencies and their liaisons. This presents two issues, at least in 

theory. At the Council level, and in all subordinate GNSO bodies, under 

this construction of "Reform", groups which have not yet obtained 

Constituency status have no means of organic participation -- that is 

the "leading edge" of the "sharp standing" problem. The "trailing edge" 

is that when any group loses Constituency status, an event I personally 

think is long overdue in two specific instances, the "BC" and the 

"ISPC", it must also lose all means of organic participation. If time, 

talent and interest were as plentiful as green house gases, the 

exclusion of capable persons, and the Draft does speak to the problem of 

selecting "appropriate individuals ... on the basis of their particular 

skill sets to serve on independent bodies", would not be problematic. 

However, this is not the case, and the intentional exclusion of 

qualified individual contributors, from pending Constituencies, and 

former Constituencies, just to restrict the scope of the "standing" 

problem to the edges of the Constituency model, where we can trivially 

identify useful people, is unfortunate, and contrary to the basic 

tenants of the Reform.

 

As a personal observation, the point of the Reform is not to simply 

change the labels on boxes or re-arrange seats at the table. It is to 

fundamentally change the nature and process of the Council, from making 

policy, and hoping someone somewhere is managing something, to managing 

something, in particular, working groups, with those working groups 

making policy. We're not really progressing towards that goal if all of 

the "reformed process" retains the determining characteristic of the 

pre-reformed process, and standing to contribute to purely 

administrative, that is, management tasks, is conditioned upon the 

fundamental criteria for policy making -- Constituency status, seats, 

and the unchanged vote calculus.

 

Eric Brunner-Williams

for the City Top-Level Domain Interest Group, the proposed City 

Top-Level-Domain Constituency (CTLDC)