motion on Chatham => RT nominations

[William Drake]

Hi,

On Jan 28, 2010, at 12:35 PM, Nuno Garcia wrote:

> The simple idea that someone has something to hide gives me the creeps....

Really?  You must spend a lot of time being creeped out.  In ICANN there are some if not total limitations on transparency at the level of precisely who said what when for the board, GAC, and on and on...poke around on the ICANN site and see if you find such fine-grained details of the meetings of all the various bodies, constituencies, stakeholder groups.  Or do the same exercise for the intergovernmental organization of your choice.  Or national governments, for that matter.  Some kinds of meetings are public and fully on the record, some are not.  Not necessarily because someone has something to hide....

In this case we were negotiating and trying to compromise with representatives of large corporations, many of whom have complex contractual situations with ICANN, other firms, etc., plus may be competitors seeking advantage against each other.  The notion that everything someone says in a meeting should be public record and personally identifiable is not part of their DNA, and when NCUC councilors have periodically had cause to insist that meetings being open and transparent this has led to some, um, interesting deliberations.  To me this is not all that nefarious or shocking, it is literally 'just business'.  Moreover, I've seen CH used in all kinds of settings, and while it's not preferable I can't say it always consequentially degraded public understanding or accountability.  

In any event, on the council call today CSG expressed some reluctance about our proposal that CH could only be used in exceptional circumstances, but in the end it was accepted as a friendly amendment and the public reply comment was approved without much discussion, meaning that the council endorsed our notions about the RTs needing some open inbound and outbound info flow.  This is a good thing that was not addressed in the staff proposal.  No idea whether the RTs will actually follow this approach though; my hope would be that the Selectors and other powers that be set some standardized parameters for transparency and communication that are applicable to all RTs, rather than letting each decide on such modalities.  Time will tell.

Moving forward, Chuck asked that the drafting team take on the next bit, developing a proposal for council consideration concerning how the GNSO will select the RT nominees to be forwarded to the Selectors.  Apparently I'm still chairing.  We need to define a fair methodology for taking in, evaluating, and deciding among applications, e.g. what qualifications are required, what kind of mix (our first thought was that we'd forward one from each SG, but there are interested parties who don't necessarily fit into any one SG, and other complexities), who will make the selection how, and so on.  We need to have a proposal by probably Sunday Feb. 7 so it can go to council, get tweaked, and made the subject of a motion one week before its meeting on Feb. 28.  We could really use NCUC members input, so if it were possible to repurpose the level of interest displayed about the CH rule that'd be great...

Also, if there are NCUCers who intend to apply for the first round (the transparency accountability RT), that'd be good to know....

Thanks much,

Bill

PS:  The Council also approved a motion to launch a PDP on vertical integration, with all the contracted parties + ISPs against and all NCSG plus IPC and BC for.  I imagine the registrars in particular are a bit concerned, if not miffed, but hopefully this can be done in a relatively quick and coherent manner.  A report on the meeting is forthcoming.