In Brief
The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council seeks volunteers to serve on a Drafting Team that will be tasked to develop a charter for a Working Group to address issues that have been raised in the context of the recent discussions on policy & implementation that affect the GNSO (see Staff Discussion Paper and session in Beijing). The Drafting Team is expected to submit the proposed Charter to the GNSO Council for approval.
What This Team Will Do
The Drafting Team is expected to develop a Charter on the basis of the GNSO Working Group Guidelines taking into account the Staff Discussion Paper as well as the discussions that took place in Beijing. At a minimum, the GNSO Council expects that the subsequent Working Group would provide recommendations on the following:
- A set of principles that would underpin any GNSO policy / implementation related discussions
- Recommendations on a process for providing GNSO "Policy Guidance"
- A framework for implementation related discussions related to GNSO Policy Recommendations and
- Further guidance on how GNSO Implementation Review Teams are expected to function and operate.
How This Team Will Work
ICANN Working Groups use transparent, open processes. The meetings of this DT will be recorded, and the recordings will be available to the public. The mailing list for the Drafting Team will be archived publicly. Drafting Team members are expected to submit Statements of Interest (SOI). The group will collaborate using a public workspace. The Drafting Team is expected to follow the GNSO Working Group Guidelines.
How to Join
The GNSO Council invites interested parties to provide names of expected participants who can then be added to the DT mailing list. The DT will be open to anyone interested to join. Community members who wish to be invited to join the group should contact the GNSO secretariat (gnso.secretariat@icann.org).
Background
Mainly as a result of discussions stemming from implementation related issues of the new gTLD program, there is increased focus on which topics call for policy and which call for implementation work, including which processes should be used, at what time and how diverging opinions should be acted upon. In order to facilitate these discussions, ICANN Staff developed a draft framework for community discussion that identifies a number of steps and criteria that might facilitate dealing with similar questions in the future. The paper identifies a number of questions that the community may want to consider further in this context, as well as a couple of suggested improvements that could be considered in the short term. While developing a bright-line rule as to what is policy or implementation may not be possible, the hope is that by developing clear processes and identifying clear roles and responsibilities for the different stakeholders, it will become easier to deal with these issues going forward and allow for broad participation and involvement. Following several discussions by the GNSO Council on this topic, the GNSO Council has now decided to form a drafting team to draft a Charter for a Working Group which will be tasked to provide concrete recommendations on how to address some of these issues from a GNSO perspective.