[council] Regarding meeting in Washington, DC - Friday 24 Feb and Saturday 25 Feb

["Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All,

As agreed during our teleconference on 6 Feb 2006, the meeting in
Washington will be for the Committee working on the new gTLD policy
development process.  The Committee is of the whole Council, but where a
Council member cannot attend, they may nominate another person from
their constituency to participate.   The constituency/Council member
should inform the GNSO Secretariat of such a nomination prior to the
meeting.

I am hoping that Olof will be able to at least have a draft Initial
Report that summarises the constituency input, the papers that have been
submitted in response to our call for papers, and the public comments
submitted via the ICANN website.

The aim of the meeting will be to consider this report and identify
areas of consensus.

We are essentially operating under the provisions of section 8(b) and
8(c), of Annex A of the ICANN bylaws.

One thing we did not cover in the Council call, was whether to hold an
open public forum.  Given that there were a few Council members that
were against this idea, and also given the additional logistics and
costs of arranging such a forum, I suggest instead that we follow up on
our call for papers on 3 January 2006:
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-03jan06.htm .  In that
call for papers we stated: "Received papers will be considered for oral
presentations to the GNSO Council during February 2006, via scheduled
conference calls with the GNSO Council."

We could simply set up a conference bridge to allow selected authors of
papers to call-in, and where cost is an issue we can call-out to
appropriate people.  

Please let me know if you agree with this approach, and also please
identify any particular papers where you think it would be beneficial
for the author to present a summary of the paper orally and respond to
questions.  I will also ask Olof to review the received papers with this
in mind.   Glen can then contact the authors and see who may be
available  (we may have to schedule time appropriate to the time zones
of the authors).

I think it is important to ensure future substantial contributions to
the policy development process, that the Committee gives significant
attention to considering these submissions - and doesn't simply rely on
reading a staff summary.


Regards,
Bruce Tonkin