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

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ray,

It would be the "Draft Proposal for GNSO Organizational Structure, 
implementing the ICANN Board Recommendation", however, given the late 
involvement of the cityTLD group in the OSC, confusion as to which draft 
is the subject of a comment is reasonable. In any event, the text 
containing the fragment "in representation of their respective 
constituency", in the section "Purpose", first sentence, and "comprised 
of officers (representatives) of the different constituencies", in the 
section "Description", 2nd paragraph of the final sentence.
Thanks for your query, and please accept my excuses for the delay in 
response, as I've both been relocating from Florida to Minneapolis, 
enrolling kids in schools, househunting, etc., and writing several CORE 
items for Sydney, as well as assisting the cityTLD group.
Eric

Ray Fassett wrote:
> 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)
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