[council] Council work

["Philip Sheppard" <philip.sheppard@xxxxxx>]

Avri, fellow Council members 

I am becoming increasingly concerned about the bureaucratisation of Council 
work.
We seem to have slipped into Council meetings every 14 days whereas since 
Council's
inception under Bruce and previous chairman, we always managed calls every 
month.
Do we have a significantly increased workload now than before ? No
Are we producing more output and more implemented policy than before ? No.

Instead I fear we are wasting time on calls with work that should be done on 
the list and
adding unnecessary duplication.
Examples:
- talking through the agenda at the start of the call - surely we can all read ?
- talking through the work plan at the end of each call - surely this admin 
item is best
left as a web page ?
- seeing multiple motions on the same issue  - surely the job of an efficient 
chair is to
resolve these issues before a call, and present one motion to Council that has 
a good chance
of success?
- voting on motions that fail - again more background work is needed
- voting on procedural motions - eg the time line for the WHOIS study - in the 
past this
would have been proposed by the Chair on list and acted upon unless there was 
opposition -
- confusing Council with multiple duplicate mailings before a call - in the 
past this
coordination was done off list between the chair and secretariat, and then one 
clear mail
sent to the list by the secretariat with all proposed motions in full text. 
- use of non ICANN work spaces like Google - what is the value of this above a 
list e-mail (
I cannot edit it on Google) ?
- discussion on admin matters such as establishing a new group to discuss an 
issue - surely
this is best done on list ?

In short, more focus on output than process, more focus on policy than admin and
consequently calls every 30 days would be welcome.

Philip