[wg-d] Freezing WG Membership

["Bret A. Fausett" <baf@fausett.com>]

From my participation with WG-C, I noted that the group often became
side-tracked by the fact that new members were joining throughout its work.
It was a distraction, an annoyance, and may have kept the group from
becoming more cohesive than it might otherwise have been. (I thought it
worked very well, actually, given its tasks and history.)

Open membership in WG-C was important for that particular group, coming as
it did early in the life of ICANN. Last year, it was quite possible that
someone might have been interested in the creation of new TLDs but ignorant
about ICANN. I doubt that is the case any longer. We might now want to
consider freezing the membership of a WG at some defined moment in time.

The primary purpose would be to create cohesiveness, build community, and
encourage compromise. With a changing membership, compromise reached one day
can be attacked the next by a new member not privy to the long conversations
and debates that went into it.

Something like a firm 60 day enrollment window at a working group's launch
would also serve to partially protect WG votes from being stacked.

On the negative side, such a rule might give a false sense of consensus, by
pushing criticism to the end (in the public comment phase).

Any thoughts on this?

        -- Bret