GNSO representation & WHOIS

[Norbert Klein]

Thanks for raising this question - or questions - for which there is no ready
and no easy answer. Having been a GNSO council member for three years, I was
time and again faced with the same question.

As you see from the "rather dauntingly high volume of traffic on the GNSO
council list" - there is an inherent structural triple problem:

Some council reps are posting a lot and do it quickly, because they are
obviously in a position to have more time for it than others.

Then there is the other problem that some GNSO councillors as constituency
representatives - referring to their constituency when it meets some of their
concerns - and in other cases act quickly as "executives" of their
constituency. There is no general rule covering all constituencies in the
same way.

And thirdly, there is our own constituency which does not have the same
homogeneity as - for example - the IP or the ISP or Business constituencies
have.

In this environment, we did work and we have to work - which means we have to
employ a lot of case by case flexibility.

That did mean in the past - and I should speak just for me - I did not think
that to share the huge amount of e-mail on the GNSO council list would be
useful. Though I had been involved with the NCUC (and predecessor structure)
since 1999, it took me some time when I became a councillor to follow, and to
understand some of the threads of discussion. Some of them coming up new, and
some dating back 7 years, with quite a history.

Therefore I think it was appropriate that the three GNSO councillors had a
kind of clarification for communication function:

1. the three of us did have direct, mutual communication, also before and
during teleconferences and during face-to-face meetings, on a second chanel -
Skype, or another chat,

2. we shared info and opinion and asked for guidance on policy matters,
especially when we were put under time pressure, from the NCUC ExCom, and

3. beyond that, we shared communication with the whole constituency.

We did not have a strict set of procedures for that - the situation was
changing over time - but I think we did well - especially as Robin took on
the task to write notes updates  on meetings for the rest of us. (Thanks,
Robin!)

This may not be the clear advice you may have hoped for - but I found myself
regularly in situations where we were expected to respond and to act fairly
quickly - while our own structure is quite proliferate and different in
nature from some of the others.

But that relates also to the nature of our constutuency. So, finally: we need
to communicate - but it has to be a volume of interpretd communication, which
can be handled realistically for our situation.


Norbert

=

On Sunday, 23 November 2008 21:39:49 William Drake wrote:

> Hello,
>
> A priori one would think that besides offering our own perspectives,
> one of the functions of the three GNSO reps ought to be to solicit
> views from NCUC members and convey the sense of the group within
> relevant GNSO discussions. I don't know what the practice and
> understanding was here previously, and would be interested to hear
> from people as to what model to follow.
>
> Since Mary and I were added during Cairo, there's been a rather
> dauntingly high volume of traffic on the GNSO council list, a good
> deal of which pertains to possible decisions on immediate action
> items (see for example http://gnso.icann.org/meetings/pending-action-
> list.pdf).  One issue of presumably strong local interest concerns
> WHOIS and the recommendations advanced by the registries
> constituency, see below.  Would people have some thoughts on this
> that Mary, Carlos and I should be conveying?
>
> Should we as a matter of course pass along all similar requests for
> constituency views and such?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bill



--
Norbert Klein
Phnom Penh/Cambodia
PGP key-id 0x0016D0A9

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