[council] Structure: The clock is ticking.

[Thomas Roessler <roessler@does-not-exist.org>]

Dear members of the council,

ICANN has indicated that it wants input before April 29 for that 
input to be useful.  According to the original (and apparently still 
effective) schedule of names council telephone conferences on 
structure, there will be PRECISELY ONE conference before that date, 
namely the April 18 telephone conference.  The next conference is 
then scheduled for May 2, which is AFTER the deadline.

With all due respect, we do not believe that the council will be 
able to produce sufficiently valuable and coherent input for the 
reform committee within mere two hours of telephone discussion which 
are prepared in a rush of last minute e-mail messages.  (As a 
reminder, open issues include the at-large question and board 
composition in general, individual domain name holder representation 
[which may be argued to be a more narrow issue than the at-large 
membership], independent review, the interaction between funding and 
participation [think NCDNHC on the one hand, and "users" on the 
other] and, of course, finding consensus on all the recommendations 
you are going to make. Finally, I could imagine that a few 
recommendations on how to _implement_ things would also be helpful.)

Also, we find it rather worrysome that, in such a situation, no 
conclusions from the April 4 telephone conference have been posted, 
yet, and that almost none of the open questions have been taken up 
in discussions on the council's mailing list, or in council members' 
contributions to the GA.



		       WE URGE THE COUNCIL TO
	    GO INTO DOCUMENT PRODUCTION MODE IMMEDIATELY.

		   DO NOT DELAY FURTHER ACTIVITIES
		UNTIL THE NEXT TELEPHONE CONFERENCE.



Philip's original approach of trying to produce drafts, capturing 
what he perceived to be consensus, was certainly the right way to 
move the council forward.  We encourage it.

As next steps in the council's work BEFORE THE NEXT CONFERENCE CALL, 
we'd suggest that you try to create mini papers on some of the 
remaining issues, either describing the perceived consensus, or 
giving an overview of the options which may be available.  These can 
then be used either as the basis for the council's final report, or 
they can be used as preparatory material for the next telephone 
conference.  (We'd also suggest to reserve phone conferences to 
highly controversial topics. The easier things, and fact-finding, 
should be done on the list.)

A lot of input for such mini papers is readily available on the net, 
and, for instance, linked to from:

	http://www.byte.org/heathrow/ 
	http://does-not-exist.org/ga-structure/

More input can be found in the GA's archives, and to a certain 
extent, also in the council's archives.


Kind regards,

Thomas Roessler and Alexander Svensson 
(GA co-chairs)