>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
My name is Marilyn Cade. I am the chair of the Business constituency, which is the short name of the Commercial and Business Users Constituency, and I brought cue cards and gifts. And I see that you are passing them out to the councillors.
I will speak very briefly but let me open my remarks by saying the following.
I want to tell you how much that my constituency appreciates the work that the council does. There are former councillors in our constituency as there are in yours, and we are very aware of the workload. Continually it slops over into our days as well. It is a tremendous workload and we have really appreciated the work you do. So I would like to open my remarks with that and how important we do think the work of the council is.
My comments will be focused not on what we do on constituency day or on gTLD policy. We will leave that to our very able councillors. And if you are interested in our agenda or you are interested in what we do, we transcribe our calls and our meetings. We also do minutes of our meetings, and they are posted on the public archive on our Web site www.biz.const.org. And yes, I know, I have to change the name.
The second thing I want to say is I want to share with all of you something I hope you had all find useful. The business constituency launched its quarterly newsletter in time for Dakar. It is something we developed ourselves. It cost us roughly a thousand euros, and that includes printing 500 glossy copies.
Sometimes people think that developing collateral is very expensive. We did this ourselves. We wrote it ourselves. We're highlighting our members. The contributions of the photos and the intellectual capital we hope makes it look good, and we would welcome sharing with you the process we used should you be interested in undertaking something like that.
But I will ask you to take a look at the sheet, the single sheet that I handed out, and I want to acknowledge the vice chair of finance and operations, Chris Chaplow, and our part-time Secretariat, Benedetta Rossi. And after I tell you what a great job they did, do not try to poach them.
The inside of the brochure and the sheet I gave you is a code sheet to understand who the current -- the new leadership is of the GNSO Council, the SGs and the constituencies, and hopefully this will support Stephane's verbal explanation of the building block approach. We were inspired to do this because of the challenge of explaining, on the back of cocktail napkins, how the council, the SG, and the constituencies fit together. So we hope you will find this helpful. It will be available on our Web site in a single-page PDF that you will be able to download and use freely, and we will keep it updated. We will also have the full brochure posted as well.
The second thing that I would like to just mention is that in Cartagena, a few of the chairs of the SGs and the constituencies gathered for breakfast informally. We had four participants and two regrets, and at this meeting, the chairs of the stakeholder groups and the constituencies joined by the chair of the council and the two vice chairs had an informal ad hoc no-host breakfast, that means we all bought our own, and did not talk about gTLD policy, because my view is that's really not what we should be doing. And we talked about the larger ecosystem challenges. I think everyone enjoyed it, found it a worthwhile thing to do and as time permits, I think we are going to do it again.
I want to make a comment about what our understanding in the B.C., led by John Berard, one of our councillors, was that perhaps this segment would turn to more interaction with the participants, both remotely and also in the room around gTLD policy topics.
I might suggest that next time, if you all agree that if you would move forward with that and maybe have a sort of a list of topics that you want people to comment on ahead of time, they could prepare for that, but you might want to also factor into that talking to Glen and the staff about slightly changing your room setup. I'm not going to go into how to organize it. You have expert staff to do that. But of course if you are going to be able to facilitate remote participation, it does take some preplanning. And so I just mention that so you could address it in time for the Costa Rica meeting planning.
Thank you.