Preserving the Transparency of Council Meetings

[William Drake]

Hi

On Jul 31, 2010, at 7:14 AM, William Drake wrote:

> Presumably NCSG will do a cll on 4 August, next Wednesday.  We will need to have a discussion there of the candidates for endorsement and get community input for the Policy Committee with an eye to the 20 August deadline for endorsements. So with apologies for the short time line, if in the next 4 days people could have a look at the candidates that would help.  We could also usefully have some discussion in advance here on the list, if the candidates would care to share their respective pitches on why they're the right people for the jobs etc.

As you may recall, in Brussels the Council passed a NCSG motion requiring that all Council calls be audiocast  in real time on the web.  Useful in terms of general transparency and accountability, but also operationally for us, as NCSGers can Skype chat with their Councilors during the session to provide input on votes etc.  

Since passage of the motion there's been some post hoc push-back from the registrars about why do we need to do this, the $60 per session is too expensive (!) and not all that many people care to listen in anyway (not supported by the numbers thus far).  I guess this combines a) the usual contracted party claim that ICANN's paying for stuff with "their money" (rather than the money of registrants), and b) a desire by some councilors not to have their SG listening in as Council performs its alchemy.

It would be good to be able to say the audiocasts are valued by the community as demonstrated by the numbers so please drop the post hoc attack.  To that end, it'd be helpful if people could log in to the audiocast.  I suppose if you're not particularly interested in what we happen to be discussing in a given session you could just turn off the volume and let it run in background while you're doing whatever else.  I'd be surprised if a vote to repeal the decision were to pass, but it'd be better to take this off the table before it attracts more adherents.

Best,

Bill