[council] Improvements to f2f GNSO meeting planning?

[Heather Forrest <Heather.Forrest@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Council colleagues,

With the meeting request notice having been sent round to the leaders of Cs and 
SGs recently, I'm wondering if now is an opportune time to raise some concerns 
raised by both Houses about the process of developing the GNSO meeting schedule.

The two main concerns I've heard are that 1) the decision-making process of 
which GNSO meetings get onto the ICANN schedule isn't very transparent and 2) 
there isn't a clear rationale for this task falling to the Council Vice Chairs, 
given the limited remit of Council under the Bylaws. I'd have to say I agree 
with both.

My understanding is that some years ago, there was a community 
volunteer-populated "meetings committee", but that this died a slow death as it 
met infrequently, was too large to be effective, and struggled to meet 
difficult deadlines. It faded into nothingness, and our GNSO support staff took 
up the task. When concerns were raised about staff making the scheduling 
decisions, staff brought the Vice Chairs into the process.

I don't think we can fully alleviate these concerns prior to Hyderabad, but we 
can try to shift our practices to introduce an opportunity for input from the 
broader GNSO community. What I'm thinking is that if SGs and Cs are willing and 
able to get their meeting requests in a few days earlier than the 12 Sept 
deadline (say, one week after the upcoming Council meeting, so Sept. 8th) then 
the Vice Chairs (sorry, Donna, I'm volunteering us for speedy action) could 
ASAP assess requests and circulate a list showing the outcome of that 
assessment to the GNSO community (via SG/C chairs or Councillors, whichever 
seems most efficient/suitable) for comment/input before the request list gets 
submitted to the ICANN scheduling team.

SGs and Cs who aren't able to get their requests in early won't benefit from 
this simply because we're to short on time for this meeting, and even the 
turnaround for comment on those that are submitted in time won't be generous. 
That said, this could be an experiment, and if we start Copenhagen planning 
immediately with this kind of process, I hope we can achieve the twin goals of 
getting the community involved and meeting our scheduling deadlines with a 
workable schedule as an outcome. In short, Council Vice Chairs would still be 
involved, but in more of an administrative capacity, with community input into 
the decision-making.

I've put this out on the list in advance of our upcoming meeting to give time 
to think about the idea in advance. Hyderabad planning will be an item on our 
upcoming agenda, and this could factor into that discussion.

Best wishes,

Heather