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

["Ray Fassett" <ray@xxxxxxxxx>]

Eric, prior to getting into the substance, does your comment/input below
pertain to the draft charter of our WT (as the subject line suggests) or the
high level principles document we've been recently deliberating?  I want to
make sure I am interpreting it in the context you are intending.

Ray


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gnso-osc-ops@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-gnso-osc-ops@xxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Eric Brunner-Williams
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 11:35 PM
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)