[council] Council restructuring

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

As agreed on yesterday's call here is a proposed response to the ICANN Board 
for its Dec 11
meeting regarding progress.
Philip
-----------------------------------------------

The GNSO is pleased to report it is making substantial progress on GNSO reform 
issues.
This progress is manifest at the Constituency level from both existing and 
in-formation
constituencies who are working on the required changes.
At the level of Council a structure has been adopted with two steering groups 
and underlying
work teams to deal with the key operational and policy changes (reference).

Staff have prepared a preliminary checklist of activities (attached) that is 
under
discussion in Council with a view to adopting this checklist with the following 
changes:
a) prioritisation
b) Interim transitional changes necessary to meet the June 2009 deadline to put 
in place an
interim functional Council
c) longer term changes necessary to fully implement the required reform.

The Council will follow certain principles in this process:
1. Leadership elections will be de novo based on the enfranchised new interim 
body
2. Full outreach and bottom up discussion at each stage of transition.

Timetable
At present Council believes the June 2009 deadline is achievable but that will 
be ultimately
determined by the cooperation and capacity of the GNSO's underlying volunteer 
bodies as well
as staff resources. Council will inform the Board in due course if it believes 
there will be
any slippage in this aspiration.