please send comments on this draft RE: Transparency

[Konstantinos Komaitis]

Thanks for this guys - great effort. I agree with Rafik that we should not hide anything here and we should be as direct as possible. One suggestion:
I would add to the last sentence something along the lines: there should be a clear statement to the community explaining the legitimate reasons for not disclosing any information. The default legitimacy is that everything should be open and transparent - so if the Board decides for whatever reason not to have information disclosed, this is by default illegitimate until evidenced or argued otherwise.

KK



Dr. Konstantinos Komaitis,
Law Lecturer,
University of Strathclyde,
The Law School,
The Lord Hope Building,
141 St. James Road,
Glasgow, G4 0LT
UK
tel: +44 (0)141 548 4306
http://www.routledgemedia.com/books/The-Current-State-of-Domain-Name-Regulation-isbn9780415477765
Selected publications: http://hq.ssrn.com/submissions/MyPapers.cfm?partid=501038



-----Original Message-----
From: Non-Commercial User Constituency [mailto:NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Avri Doria
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 12:58 PM
To: NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Re: please send comments on this draft RE: Transparency

Hi,

By the time the ALAC meeting got to the joint statement, 3 things had occurred;

- they were about 30 minutes or more behind in their meeting.  This did afford us an in depth view of their processes, which would be fascinating to the sausage maker.

- they only had a few minutes for us because the CFO was coming in to speak to them and he of course had priority on their time. They therefore did not have much time to discuss the draft, though we did make a few minor changes to their text during the meeting.

- they had taken the original draft I sent and reformed it into the text below.

The process we agreed to was to put to this you all for review.  If there are changes we want to make then we will work with Adam and Evan to reconcile the text.


a.

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ICANN's transparency commitment demands the adoption of a principle of
default openness for all Board communications, unless specifically
overidden by the principle of personal privacy or an explicit
requirement for confidentiality.

It is especially critical that the contributions of supporting
organizations and advisory committees be presented to the Board
accurately and completely. While we appreciate the need for staff to
summarize matters that are often complex, we must stress the
importance of ensuring that these summaries accurately report the
relevant facts and positions. Openness and public review will minimize
inaccuracies, facilitating the role of staff while enhancing public
confidence in the Board's decision-making process.
.
We request that the Board change its policy so that all briefing
documents are made publicly accessible in advance of presentation,
except for those which for explicit legitimate reason must be
confidential.