Final Motions on ARR Public Comment

[William Drake]

Good morning,

The Council call is in three hours and we need to get our proposed amendments in.

On the draft ARR and Chatham, we have two options.  

1.  Robin favors an absolutist approach in which CH is entirely struck, per my suggestion yesterday:

"Communications between the review teams and the SO/ACs should be prudent and necessary to support the teams and/or convey major concerns."

As I said, I suspect this would be regarded as unfriendly and would not garner support outside NCSG.  So we stand on a principle but lose, the existing Chatham language stays in, and we get our least preferred outcome.  Not the best way to conclude some game theory, in my view.

2.  Mary's language offers an incremental improvement:

"It is expected that any communications or other input sought and received will be provided in good faith, and that SOs/ACs will exercise prudence and make use of the opportunity when it is necessary to support the teams and/or convey major concerns. In exceptional circumstances, a SO or AC, the review teams or members thereof may consider it necessary to subject such communications or other input to reasonable restrictions such as the Chatham House rule, and where this is the case, the relevant parties to the affected communication or input shall, as far as possible, be informed in advance."
 
This has the advantage of probably being regarded as friendly and passable with business support.  It leaves open what constitutes an exceptional circumstance.  IF the Selectors and RTs decided to take this Council advise on board in their operating agreements (by no means a foregone conclusion) and when it came time for RT members to periodically fill in their AC/SOs someone said well this particular communication should be under Chatham, there'd be the possibility to debate whether the situation is really exceptional and the content being conveyed has to be scrubbed of names.  The RTs are supposed to operate by consensus normally, one would think this could ultimately play out in a manner we find suitable.  Worst case scenario, for a given communication, a GNSO RT member might have to say something like "there was a majority feeling in the team that x while a minority felt y."  Personally, while at the level of principle this seems less desirable, in practice I don't see it as a massive blow to transparency.  With (hopefully) teams of like 15 comprising representatives with pretty much know positions anyway, I suspect we'd be able to glean who's saying what from the account if that really is material.

So my suggestion to Rafik is that he submit Mary's version of the motion rather than mine, ASAP.  Let's have something that can pass and actually be helpful rather than standing on an unsupported principle and getting a worse outcome (if any).

It should also be noted that yesterday night the IPC put forward an amendment regarding the support teams, which Chuck took on board as friendly:

"Even if the size of the review teams is expanded per the above, managing all the work envisaged over extended time periods will be very challenging. As such, it is reasonable to expect that there will be instances where some task-specific support may be needed, e.g. with data collection, that would impose a substantial burden on both team members and the staff. One way of addressing these challenges would be to constitute a support team for each review that can be turned to for targeted assistance. The review teams could draw such teams – but not exclusively - from the pools of nominees that were not selected for review team membership. If those pools were not sufficiently robust or did not offer the specialized expertise needed, the SO/ACs could suggest additional names for consideration by the review teams."

This is mostly editorial, but the key point is at the end: instead of the Selectors deciding from names submitted, it would be the RTs themselves that do this.  I think this is an improvement, enhancing RT soverignty rather giving automatic deference to the Selectors.


Best,

Bill




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