GNSO Working Session
ICANN Meeting
Seoul, South Korea
Sunday, 25 October 2009

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Ladies and gentlemen, we need to get started with
the meeting, so let's -- for those that want to participate, this is
going to be the working group work team meeting until 11:30 this
morning.  We'll start here in about five minutes.  I just want to let
everyone know what's in here.  It's the working group work team.

All right, everyone.  We're going to get started.

I just want to remind everyone that we are being transcribed.  We
are being recorded.  And there is audio streaming.

So if that's a problem for you, I wanted you to know that that is
occurring.

Also, during the meeting, if you speak, would you please say your
name, both for those that may be listening and for the transcribers
so that they -- they know a lot of the people here but they don't
know everyone, so if you could announce your name when you speak,
that would be great.

You see up on the screen that --

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Is it readable or --

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Yeah, I think so.  It is for me.  Well, you can
also go to the TWiki site and you can look at the document there. 
But before we get into the actual document, we have Jeff Neuman with
us.  Jeff is the chair of the PPSC, which is the Policy Process
Steering Committee, and he is also chair of the PDP working team.

So they are working on pieces of this project as well, and one of
the things that we wanted to do today for like the first 15 or 20
minutes is sort of look at what their group is doing, so we can see
how it dovetails with what we're doing.

Because portions of our work is interdependent on resolutions from
other groups, because what we're doing is putting together sort of a
manual for what the processes are and how it works, but we're not
making some substantive decisions.  We're just putting those
decisions, once they've been made, into a document for reference for
newcomers so they can understand how it works and how the process is.

So Jeff, if you would please give us an update on exactly what
substantively your group is going to be -- is doing and hopes to do
over the next term, so that we can see how that's going to dovetail
into our document and then we can talk -- once we sort of get a feel
for where you are, we can talk about how it's going to work within
our stuff.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Sure.  And Marika, we actually did some slides
yesterday.  Is there any possibility to pick those up?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yes.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Maybe that's probably the easiest way to do it.

And we could skip over -- let's see.  I was just going to test my
eyesight here, if I clean my glasses.

Okay.  We just want to -- I think so our objective is -- on the PDP
work team is to really go from the beginning to the end of the policy
development process, and basically look at how we can incorporate the
working group approach that you all are working on into the overall
policy development process and making it more effective and
responsive to the needs of -- you know, we've all -- a lot of us have
been involved in this for a number of years, and a number of us have
observed good things and bad things about the existing policy
development process, and really it's looking back at that and trying
to come up with a better way to move forward.

What we're doing is -- it's also in response to the Board Governance
Committee's report from a couple years ago now -- I guess it's been
going on for a while -- to make a more effective and more realistic
policy development process.

So essentially if you'd go to the next slide here, we'll just go on
to the next one too.  I want to be more brief.

So there's different stages to the policy development process work
team.  The PDP work team's work.  We divide it essentially into five
stages and then a final one, which is on a few slides forward, about
overarching issues that really permeate through each of these five
different ones.  So we've spent time talking about the first stage,
which is really planning and initiation of an issues report.  The
second stage being, okay, what happens when this issues report and
the council has to vote on it and initiating a formal PDP process.

The third stage, which is really where you guys fit in most
integrally is the working group procedures and support.  The areas
that we're talking about are more how you can get support from the
council to do your work, certain things like public comment periods,
when they're inserted into the whole working group process, things
about voting on a charter.

You all are working on developing the perfect charter, but
essentially it's how does the council go about receiving that
charter, voting on it, approving it.  What are some of the time
frames involved with that.

In the fourth stage -- and then it's mostly passed off to you guys
to talk about how the working group actually operates and y'all have
worked on charter and rules and how to deal with -- internally with a
nonfunctioning working group, whereas we're dealing with it from the
external source:  What if the council is noticing that the working
group's not necessarily doing what it's supposed to be doing, or the
council wants to -- the oversight function of the council over the
working group.

The fourth stage, then -- so the working group produces its product.
Then what happens to it?

And that's where the fourth stage picks up for the PDP work team,
which is getting it up to the council, when does the council have to
vote on it, how they go about it, what -- what can the council do
with the report from the working group.  You know, is it -- can it
take pieces, can it take a piecemeal, can it just -- or is it just
forced to approve the whole thing and send it back?

These are the issues that are being talked about.

And then the last stage, the fifth stage, which is one that
surprisingly has never been in the policy development process before,
which is really how do we go about assessing the effectiveness of the
policy and assessing compliance with that policy.

So if we could go to the next slide.

I don't think -- we could just go ahead of this.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I'll tell you one area where we need some
guidance --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Sure.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  -- and understanding is in our document, there
are sections that talk about coming to a determination within a
working group, how you decide consensus.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Right.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And we have not tackled the -- except in sort of
academic discussions -- how that would be done.  And my question is: 
We believe that that -- that the model for that needs to be
universal.  That developing consensus, there needs to be a universal
understanding of what that means so that when we explain that, that
everyone knows it's not, "Oh, there's consensus means X in this group
and consensus means X in that group," that there's some universal
understanding of how you go about that process.

We want to put that in our document, but we're -- we don't believe
that it is for us to substantively come up with that determination
because it's -- it applies on many levels.  And so I -- is that
something you guys are going to be working on when you talk about
your voting and implementation?  Is that something that the OSC is
working on?

I mean, that's one of the reasons we wanted to have this, is we know
that it needs to go in, but we don't want to put in what we come and -
- come to consensus on as a process and then be told, "Well, no, the
OSC has one and we've got one."

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Well, it's interesting because in most of the areas
of the PDP, they don't really use -- there are really specific
thresholds that are predetermined by the bylaws.  Well, you know,
that are in the new bylaws.

So for most of that, really when you're talking about consensus,
it's really within the working group model.

What we have talked about and things -- and we haven't gotten to the
fourth stage yet, which is the voting and implementation, which is
what you see in this chart.

Most of the ones we've been with have been, "Okay, well, you know,
there's a specific threshold in the bylaws now of what it takes to
approve a formal PDP, to get that started, but there's nothing in
there about what it takes to approve a charter."  Right?  That's a
separate issue.

So we've talked about thresholds for that.  But it's never been in
terms of, "It needs to be a rough consensus, a consensus."  It's
always been specific thresholds that we've talked about.  Looks like
Marilyn's got a comment.

>>MARILYN CADE:  You know, one of the things we probably -- I liked
your term "universal," because I do think that there needs to be
consistent standards at various stages.

In a working group -- what we used to call a task force -- at
various times when I was chairing we took the sense of the group and
documented it.  But that was -- there was never a requirement we do
that.  But, you know, if you don't have some kind of thresholds along
the way, then you literally could get to the end of your working
group and not be able to get the product out the door to the council.

I would think, Jeff, that, you know, this is something that we ought
to be thinking about maybe recommendations coming through the working
group that can be more broadly vetted, but we probably want to also
look and see whether other groups within -- you know, the only other
place I could think of that there might be practices related that we
might look at within ICANN would be the ccTLD, unless the ALAC also
may have thresholds established for various -- and it might just be
worth looking at those quickly from a staff perspective.

The thresholds in the PDP, though, are -- we do expect to build in
the thresholds at the various stages of the PDP, so the working group
needs to work backward from that.  Would that be what you think?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Ken?

>>KEN BOUR:  Yes, thanks.  Ken Bour.

Just a couple things.  I think we are a little bit confused on two
subjects.

When J. Scott was talking about consensus -- I want to come back to
Marilyn's point too.  When he was talking about consensus, he was
talking about within the working group, with respect to its
deliberations at reaching internal decisions, not with respect to any
particular threshold.

So once -- and the working group guidelines that we're -- that we're
struggling with are not specific to policy development activities. 
Any working group -- in fact, this team itself is a working group,
and so these procedural would apply just as well to an OSC team or a -
- as they would to a policy process.

One of the activities at the end was to go back to your team, Jeff,
and see if there are specific PDP issues that need to be fastened
into the working group that are specific to that -- to PDP that would
not generally apply to other groups.

And I also wanted to just make a comment to Marilyn that thanks to
Bart, on the policy staff, I did get the cc procedures, and I
circulated them to our team so we do have those.  Thanks.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  I just wanted to clarify like because what
currently is in the working group work team document is actually the
language is that being used for PDP work teams in their charter.  So
that talks about unanimous consensus, rough consensus, strong
support, minority viewpoints.  So that's language that's currently
being used.  I don't think, you know -- it was never formally adopted
but it has been the practice, so maybe the discussion should be is
that, you know, is that the approach we want to continue moving
forward on?  Should there be more definitions around those concepts? 
And should there be a difference between, you know, ordinary working
groups and PDP working groups, should there be a different approach.

So just to clarify that.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And I have no problem with us making a
recommendation on that.  But I wanted to make sure that we weren't
coming up with the working group version of sort of this, and
somebody else was coming up --

What I want to do is have buy-in from everybody that we're going to
work through this issue.  We'll be glad to recommend up what we think
and then the whole group work on ours, what we've come together, but
I don't want competing wars or -- because it's a lot of time to come
into these issues.

I personally -- and I'm a nonvoting chair -- think the language we
have now is a good starting place because it is sort of a
codification of existing practices, and if there are tweaking that
needs to be done because people think that there are problems with
that, I'm all about doing that, and I would have no problem putting
in what we've already got.

But I wanted to make sure from --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  -- your level that that's what you want us to do.
That we're not waiting on someone else to figure this out, that we
just drop that in.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I guess what I -- I probably did a bad job of
explaining it.  I guess this is really within your bailiwick.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Okay.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  This is not something that's come up in our PDP --
in our discussions because everything that we have is by a predefined
threshold.  There's no terms in the stuff that we're talking about
that -- you would never use the term "consensus," right?  Everything
for us is it goes to the council level, it has to be voted on by this
threshold.  And so it's all predefined, whereas -- at least so far. 
I guess Marika has got something.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yes.  Because in principle, we haven't really
spoken about -- you know, because indeed, we assume that the working
group worked and would be doing that, how a working group indeed,
when developing its report -- we've talked about, you know, what
products they should be out, you know, if they should run public
comment periods.  But we haven't really spoken about how do they get
to decisions.  Because there is no voting threshold for a working
group to adopt their report, so it is an issue that we might want to
raise --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Well, we'll get to that -- once the working team
does what it does, whatever it is that it does, once that's delivered
to the council, we'll talk about, again, the specific thresholds that
will preestablished.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yes.  But it's --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  But we're not going talk -- and then they'll look at
-- the council will look at what the working group did and the levels
of support within it, in order to make their assessment.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yes, but I guess the question is for work -- a
PDP work -- PDP working group to come to a decision on their report,
what kind of decision-making methodologies should they use.  Is that
indeed -- do we use the universal Oprah Winfrey that the working
group work team is being -- is developing or should a separate
discussion be held in the PDP work team to decide what kind of voting
mechanism or definition of "consensus" should be used in the case of
PDP working groups for a working group to reach -- adopt that
recommendation.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Okay.  Let's do one thing.  First of all, can you
put up our document that has what we've codified, so everyone can
sort of just see what we're talking about --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS: -- what we talked about in Sydney, I believe. 
There were four or five of us that had a pretty long discussion about
this.

So I want to do that.

Secondly, I would like to put out to the group that I don't think we
should have different definitions of what consensus is, depending on
what your subject matter is.  I think that leads to nothing but
bickering and complaining about process.  I think there should be a
universal understanding of what "consensus" means, and it doesn't
matter whether you're deciding who's going to be the chair of the
working group, what time you're going to meet, or if this is what
we're going to recommend up to the council.

It has to be the same definition of "consensus" on all decisions, no
matter how ministerial or how policy-oriented, because if you start
getting into these different definitions then you're going to argue
about how you reached your conclusion and it just needs to be the
same.  That's my opinion.

Marilyn and then Jaime and then Gray.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Yeah.  I wanted to ask a question of Marika. 
Again, just going back to the historical experience, we had a process
at one point of showing the -- it was the transmittal to the council
from the task force, right?  And it was a vote that was -- so there
may have been previous votes, but this was the vote about
transmitting the report to the council as a policy recommendation
from the task force, and that had a -- that had a threshold on it. 
But it was the -- that superseded -- in the task force work, that
superseded previous votes at various stages because this was the
final task force report to the council for approval for passing on.

Now, I just want to say it seems to me that you still need that. 
Right?  You still need the documentation of including whether they're
going to be minority reports, but my second question to J. Scott's
point, we have a different threshold, for example, for establishing
an issues long story short than we do for approving policy, but we
don't have a different definition of what those thresholds are.

So to your point about consistent thresholds, I think that's really
important.  Otherwise, I think what people will do is they'll say,
"Well, I want to work on this project and so I have a lower threshold
of support needed."  You can spin a lot of wheels without being able
to get to policy.

However, how does that issue -- how -- and somebody else on the
staff -- maybe Ken or Marika, maybe you -- could answer the question:
If the council wants to just authorize a study before you don't --
you know, before you get to the issues report, where are we
addressing that threshold?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Well, that's not for this working group, so I'm
going to let him take that question and he can ask that question to
his group when they meet at 2:00, because that -- you can just -- if
you want.

But I don't think that that's for this group.  I need to get to
Jaime --

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Can I answer to the first question.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Yes.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Just an answer to your first question.  Current
practices in working groups is that once they deliver their final
report, there's no vote.  The report that is being presented is the
consensus of the working group.  In that report, there might be
minority viewpoints.  We've had some reports where a minority
viewpoint would be stated, not specifying who made that point but
just making the point that a certain point was either, you know,
supported or had some support or there was a minority viewpoint.

But the overall report or recommendations are not separately voted
upon.  It's -- in the working groups I've supported, it's the feeling
of the group then the report that's on the table, that's the
consensus of the working group.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Let me be sure.  So that's the transmittal vote
that documents the consensus of the working group, right?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yes, but it's not an official vote.  It's just a
document that's being shared under the assumption that that's the
consensus of the working group.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Well, you have to -- you may not call an official
vote, but unless you take a vote, you can't document consensus. 

>>MARIKA KONINGS: It's not -- 

>>J. SCOTT EVANS: Well, I will tell you this:  That the general
understanding I've had -- and I would like to see hands from my work
team.  My work team, we've operated under the assumption that voting
is out, and that getting consensus is going to be something other
than voting.

So, you know, it's gauging but it's not really taking a vote.  It's
more like taking a temperature I would say is --

>>MARILYN CADE:  Okay, okay.  Fine, but I ---is that something --

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Right.  There is going to be call for consensus
and then there is a gauge and once that has been gauged, the chair
uses -- the way we've designed it is you can see the chair then takes
the temperature and based on their understanding, they call -- this
is what we've got rough, we've got unanimous, we've got whatever, and
I have said again and again, and -- and I -- my opinion is the fail-
safe in all of this is the appeal.  Is if somebody believes the chair
has overstepped or defined it in a way that is not reflective of the
record, they can bring in the liaison or the chartering organization
is to, "I was on that working team and I think this has been
overstated, "Or, "You left out the minority report," or that kind of
thing.  Okay.  I want to go to Jaime, please.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Jaime.  And I would like a clarification of your
viewpoint, because I see here that these five positions -- unanimous
consensus, rough consensus, strong support, minority viewpoint, and
no consensus -- they seem to be quite good for I would say not to
build consensus but to at least manage the census, you know, and what
is -- I agree with you that that excludes voting and it's kind of a
way --

I think it's a good guideline to reach or at least manage the
census, not to reach consensus.  What is your problem with that? 
Your overture was not clear to me.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  We didn't have a problem with this.  We just
didn't know it was under our purview to suggest that this model be
the model.  We thought that we were supposed to -- we didn't know
whether someone else was going to say to us, "This is the model," and
we were just going to stick it into our document.  We don't have a
problem with this -- at least I don't think we do.  I think the only
thing was, we weren't really sure if there wasn't another group that
was working on what does "consensus" mean.  And we were like, "Well,
if they're doing that, then the best call for us would be, rather
than coming up with a separate model that would then compete, is to
sit back and wait and then just drop that definition into our
document."

Now that this has been clarified for us, we are under the
understanding that we are going to come forward with a codification
that then may be adapted in public comment, may be tweaked by others
as they see this.  This is the jumping-off point.  But we understand
that that is now under our purview and we will do that.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  But just a matter of history.  This came up in this
working group or it is inherited from some other paper?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  This is a codification or a -- it is written
statement of how the task force system has been working to date.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Okay.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  This is how -- that's where -- what we did was we
talked to Avri and others who have worked through this system is that
has sort of been undefined over the last two years, and they said,
"This is what we do."  And so we just took it and scribed it down.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  And it was not scribed anywhere?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  No, it was -- 

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Well, it may be somewhere, but --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  This actually came up in the creation of this group.
This very issue was debated by people saying, "Well, how is this PDP
work team going to work and how is the working group work team going
to work?"  And we created -- we took past charters and just put one
together.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's right.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  We got people to agree on it, and then -- but some
people started complaining, and we said, "Don't worry about it.  The
working group work team will look at this issue.  We hear your
concerns.  We got to start with something.  This is what we're going
to start with, and the working group work team will then work with
that."

>>JAIME WAGNER:  So is this a creation of this work team.  Yes?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Right.  Okay.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Okay.  Thank you.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  So I want to say Graham is next and then Margie.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  It's -- I think it's great.

>>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  Gray Chynoweth.  My only comments are I guess
just to make sure that I'm not confused here.  

When we send up -- the things that would need a threshold at the
GNSO to become policy, part of the policy development process, we're
not making any decisions that would bear on it.  Even if we're
working on policy development -- even if it's a policy development
working group, the eventual consensus or threshold that needs to be
reached, that needs to be reached by the council.  Correct?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Right.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's right.

>>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  So the working group, when it's working on its --
when its doing its job, I'm not sure that it even needs -- that -- it
may be good to have the same kind of consensus that you would need at
the council level, but I'm not sure if that really, at the end of the
day, gets you anywhere, because -- so it's all encapsulated in what
we're doing at this level and at that level, because they're going to
have formal representation from each of the stakeholder groups and
we're going to have who knows who is going to join this --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So the council will have a formal voting threshold. 
That's what they have.  But one of their --

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's different from consensus.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  One of the things that they need to determine,
though, when they vote is was a consensus achieved in the working
group below it. that's going to influence their -- or should
influence their vote.

That part is within our group.  As to how it gets to the council,
the options council has, and the standard of review, if you will,
that the council has over the working group's product.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Right.  And what I'm hoping is the codification
of this formula of how to gauge -- right? -- puts in process, in
stone, something that everyone has a universal understanding of,
"This is what they mean when they said that," so that you don't have
Version A, Version B, and Version C of "consensus," so we have a
whole discussion at the council level about what it meant to have
consensus.

No, it's this -- it's this.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Right.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Is what it meant.  Everyone has a clear meaning
and then there's something to gauge it against.  If somebody comes up
and says there wasn't consensus, they go, "Well, here's what you're
supposed to do.  What's missing?"  And they can then manage the
process.

This is a guide to them.  They know that this is what they should
have been working under, the framework.  Margie.

>>MARGIE MILAM:  I think it's difficult to say that there will not
be different definitions of "consensus" because some of it is
dictated by contract, and I understand what you're talking about here
relates to consensus on a work group, but the registry agreements and
the registrar agreements talk about "consensus" in a different way,
so I -- we're going to have that discrepancy, no matter what.

I just wanted to clarify that.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.  I just think it's an unfortunate use of the
same term.  I don't think any working group or even the policy
development process needs to worry at all whether something fits
within the definition of a registry or registrar agreement.

I think there -- the working group's job is to come to a consensus
on its product.  Whether that falls within the picket fence, whether
that's a consensus according to the registrar accreditation
agreement, that's a determination that's made by essentially ICANN
staff, the board, the registry -- not even necessarily the council as
to whether --

>>MARILYN CADE:  (Speaker is off microphone).

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Oh, the general counsel, yes.  Sorry.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I think the best way to talk about this is the
consensus I'm talking about is small c and the consensus you're
talking about is capital C.

>>MARGIE MILAM:  That's right.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And while they're the same term, one has a legal
definition in a contract and small c can be big C, but not necessarily.

>>MARGIE MILAM:  Sometimes.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And I know that -- but that's what you have to
understand --

>>MARGIE MILAM:  It is very confusing.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And that's what we'll just have to -- somehow
we'll -- maybe we put in a footnote, maybe we do some explanation
about the fact that there's terminology here that you need to be
aware of, that when we speak of "consensus" here we're talking about
coming to agreement, not the definition that's in the contract, or
something.  And maybe we want to throw a footnote in, or something,
just so that -- because this is for the newcomer that's looking this
document up, trying to understand the process, and that's a good
clarification point.

>>MARGIE MILAM:  Sure.  And where it even gets more confusing is
when the group wants to come up with a consensus -- where the goal is
to come up with something that's enforceable on the contracted
parties.  You know, I think it's, you know, inaccurate to say that
the group's not going to look at whether there will be consensus in
the end, because I think that might be the goal of the work team to --
to actually come up with a policy that is enforceable.

So, you know, it sounds nice to say that there isn't going to be
confusion, but maybe we come up with different definitions or
something, so that we can distinguish between the two.

But it will be addressed.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  But the working group -- what the working group
comes up with as a definition of "consensus" for the contracts is --
as a registry is irrelevant.  I don't care what -- I mean, there is a
contractual -- what J. Scott is saying, there's a contractual term,
and there's nothing the working group can do to influence whether it
reaches the consensus policy under that registry agreement.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Okay.  As chair, I'm going to bring this section
to close because I believe we've answered our yes and our question
was:  Is it our purview to come up with a codification, and that
question has been answered yes.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yes.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  So let's -- let's go.  Let's charge forward.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  (Speaker is off microphone).

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Yes.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS: Another issue I would like to bring up -- and
something that came up yesterday in the updates to the council --
there was a question of public comment period.  It is an issue that
has been discussed in the PDP working team.  And I think the initial
feeling there was to have a public comment period before presenting
the recommendations to the PPSC for their review.  I think in this
group it hasn't been discussed yet.  But there was some discussion
yesterday where people said should that maybe be harmonized?  Should
there be a similar approach whether to have a public comment period,
when to have a public comment period before sending it to the PPSC or
afterwards.  So that's maybe something the two groups might like to
discuss about as well or have an opinion on so the PPSC can take that
into consideration.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS: I would like to put to the group that I think we
should do exactly what the other group is doing.  We follow it march,
lock, step so that we are -- no one's confused about different
process.  And, personally, the more public comment we get, hopefully,
we're just educating the participants in the process.  And it gives
us something to react to so that we're not in a vacuum.  So I have
absolutely no problem.  And I would just put to the group that we'll
follow the same process, we will put it out for public comment before
we present the final document to the PPSC.  Is everyone comfortable
with that?  We have consensus?  Small "c."

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  So just to explain what we're doing, if you go back
to -- there's five stages and then some overarching issues.  We are
developing draft reports at each of those stages.  And one of those
is already out on the first stage.  The second one is -- I have a
draft of it.  It's going to get out.  When I say, "out," I mean out
to our team, not anyone else, although it's on the TWiki so anyone
can read it.  It's not hidden.  The goal is to get all five of these
done, stages in draft reports to produce one big report that would go
out for public comment.  And the rationale that we don't want to send
individual ones out is we're finding, as we go through each of these
stages, there are things that relate to previous stages.  There are
updates and things that we need to make consistent between all of the
stages that we may have talked about in stage 1; but, actually, it
belongs in stage 3. Or it's usually the other way around.  We talk
about it in stage 3, and it really belonged in stage 1.  So there's
constant evolution of those documents.  So the timeline for us -- I
mean, I know you guys worked -- you guys worked on a charter -- what
should be in a charter.  I think that is the type of document that
could go out completely independent of waiting for us to be done.  So
I think there's --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I'm not saying --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN: -- there's aspects -- what you're saying is we're
putting it out for public comment before it goes to PPSC. That's what
you're --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  We're not waiting on you.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  In fact, ours probably -- I think you've
answered the questions I had for today.  So, if you need to go,
you're welcome to stay.  But I'm just saying, I don't think we need --
I'm not -- what I want to do is I want to get back to the document
itself.  So I want to look at, if I can -- this is different than
what we'd intended to do.  And what I'd like to do is look at that
consensus session that's in the first document.  Because that first
document is very, very close to complete, that charter document.  And
I'd like to look at this consensus section and see if, when we've got
people face-to-face -- and some of the people who have been
conflicted out of being on our calls are here today -- that we can
get this and maybe get that sewn up so we can do a call for consensus
on that whole document and then push it maybe out for public comment,
even though the fact that we may say one of things we're doing is
thinking about putting this in a whole document.  What do you think? 
We might ask a question.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Because my question will be for that wouldn't it
make more sense to try to integrate the two and put that whole
document out for public comment instead of doing all the charter
guidelines?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's fine.  Let's get to this paragraph.  Is it
paragraph 3?  3.6.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Because what we're looking at now is the working
group guidelines document, not the charter guidelines.  We,
basically, said if we integrate those, we don't need to duplicate --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's right.  So this is the standard
methodology for making decisions.  For everyone -- for those of you
who have not participated in our calls and have not -- we have a new
GNSO member today that has not followed this probably as closely as
many.  So let me explain what this document is.  This is the document
that I mentioned yesterday that is designed to give to working
groups.  And they would get this working group.  And it sets forth
certain processes and normative behaviors that they would then
understand that this is how the working group is going to operate. 
And one of the paragraphs is this one, 3.6, which talks about making -
- what's the standard methodology for knowing that you've made a
decision?  Okay.  And so that's where we are on background.  Again, I
think, as this sits, it's a good draft to put out for public comment.
But I'd like to hear from the voting members or the -- you know,
those that are representative of their groups, since I'm nonvoting
chair, what do you all want to do and think about this particular
section?  Take a few seconds to read it over.  But, again, I want you
to know that this really is a rough format of what we're already doing.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  One question I have, as you can see, do you
really want to talk about the process like, if people don't agree
with the designation of consensus of the different positions? 
Because there was one question we raised in the document here is that
the current language deals with certain situations but doesn't seem
to address all the elements.  One example here is, like, what if a
liaison does not agree with the chair?  What happens then on -- like,
if the chair designates a certain position but the liaison says, "I
don't agree.  I don't think it's rough consensus.  I think it's
strong support"?  What would happen then?  What would be the method
for objection?  So there are some elements that seem to be not
spelled out here. And it's a question whether we need to work through
those different scenarios and include those as well.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Gray?

 >>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  The one comment I would have is, understanding
the difference between strong support but significant opposition and
minority viewpoints.  And I guess the explanation that I would need
to see is it seems, I guess, as though the difference is that
significant oppositions means there's one group that has a different
idea that doesn't agree with kind of the broader group, larger group.
And then minority viewpoints is that there's multiple -- there's a
large group that doesn't agree with the majority, but there's
multiple groups within that minority.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  The minority viewpoint can be both in case of
rough consensus and strong support, I think, or at least in my
experience.  It's, basically, you might have rough consensus where
you say I might agree, but I don't necessarily have a different
viewpoint.  Or you might have a case with rough consensus or strong
support and someone says, "I really don't agree because I think this
is how it should be, and I want to see that recorded in the
documents."  So a minority viewpoint can occur in cases of rough
consensus and strong support.  It's not necessarily -- or you might
have only minority viewpoints.  That is another an option where no
one agrees, but everyone has very strong different views on what --
you know, the recommendations.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Then I think this is flawed as drafted.  I think
-- because it's not -- a minority viewpoint is not a -- what it
should say is unanimous consensus, rough consensus, strong support,
no consensus.  And then it should say in the case of rough consensus,
strong support, and no consensus, there will be minority viewpoints
that da, da, da, da, da.  And that's how it should be.  Because
bullet-pointed out like that it looks like it's something rather than
more of a process when you come to one of the others.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  That's why we added here -- I mean, we took the
language as it was.  But we already foresaw this as well and saying
maybe there should be a clarification that -- you know, minority
viewpoint occurs, although it can still be -- to be honest, I've
never seen it where the only minority viewpoint.  So there's no --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  But that would be no consensus.  Actually,
that's no consensus.  And the only difference is what you're saying
is, when you get to one of these, your documentation for that is
minority viewpoints.  So I put out to the group, do you agree that we
need to remove that from the bullet and put in an explanatory
paragraph that says the process, when you get these, is to seek out
minority viewpoints and make sure that those are turned over to the
council or your chartering organization with your main report and
main decision?

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Even in the case of no consensus that would be a
set of minority viewpoints, yes?

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Could be.  It could be that nobody wants to put
out a minority viewpoint.  But I think, as chair, you have an
obligation to say, "We have no consensus.  I'm going to call for
everybody to put out their minority viewpoint so I can turn it in." 
If you don't get anything, then you don't turn anything in.  But I
think you have to let them know that that is something they can do.  

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  By the way, I totally agree with your removing of
the bullets at another level.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Avri, you have a comment that's noted in red
below.  And we probably skipped over your comments in our conference
call when we discussed this because we left this session to come back
to.  So, if you would refresh your recollection, as they say in
evidentiary law, and sort of look it over and then, if you want to
make that point, you still feel that is a relevant point, if you
would explain it to the group.

 >>AVRI DORIA:  Yeah, I think so.  I think what I'm recommending
there is the rest of --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  You need to move the mic closer.  You're hard to
hear.

 >>AVRI DORIA:  This is -- okay.  I got it.  Okay.  Yeah, I think
there the question was -- there was a question about what the rest of
the process was.  And so, basically, I was trying to define the rest
of the process there as a first estimation.  That, if the council
supported the chair and the liaison's position, this is, basically,
what happens when it goes to the council.  So at this point they have
supported the chair and liaison's position.  So attach a statement
of, basically, all of the information.  So of the appeal to the board
report as well as the response to that appeal.  And then it should
include all of the documentation from all of the steps in the process
and should include a statement from the council or the CO, the
chartering organization.  So it's, basically, the last step in the
process.  If the appeal goes all the way to the CO, if the CO
approves it, then it -- agrees with the person making the claim,
then, obviously, you go all the way back and fix.  But, if they say,
"Yep, liaison and chair did the right thing.  We support their
decision," then they have to attach the whole story as an appendix.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Marika, in answer to your question earlier, I
would assume -- and we'll look to the group.  And I'm going to call
on Cheryl to sort of put some input in here, because she deals with
appeals-like process a lot.  But I would assume that you said what
happens if the liaison who's assigned to the group disagrees with the
call the chair has made on consensus?  I would assume that the
liaison's appeal would go directly to the chartering organization.

 >>CHERYL LANGDON-ORR:  Yeah, that makes perfect sense, J. Scott, yes.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  If a member says, "I disagree," they go to the
liaison.  And the liaison then looks over that.  And they decide
whether they're the appeal mechanism and it goes to the council. 
But, if it's the liaison that's got the problem, then it would go
just directly to the group.  You just pull them out of the process.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  The question relates to as well to point 2 where
it, basically, talks about if the liaison supports the chair
position, forward appeal to the chartering organization.  So it's
saying, well, what if the liaison doesn't agree?  What do you do
then?  If --

 >>AVRI DORIA:  Liaison doesn't agree with the chair?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yes.  It's not the liaison making the same --

 >>AVRI DORIA: Then the person that made the appeal has prevailed.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's right.

 >>AVRI DORIA:  I mean, the chair can then take it up with the
council.  But the person, basically, made an appeal.  The chair said,
"No."  The liaison said, "But yes."  And, yeah, then the chair can
perhaps take it further.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Yeah, the chair would have the option, just like
-- the chair has the same rights as a member.  They would go to the
chartering organization, if they didn't agree with the liaison's
decision.  The ultimate purveyor of whether the process is working,
as I understand the way this is designed to work, is the council.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  So we just work it further out, so it's clear.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's right.  And, if we put language in there
to put the different scenarios down.  And, if you'd make a note to do
that, then we can review that.  But that's what I think we're talking
about here.  

So what I would suggest now is we sort of understand that this is
how it's going to be.  Marika is going to put in some comments and
flush out this appeal mechanism and how it works under various
scenarios.  And we can look at that in our next draft, so that we can
move on to our next session.

 >>GRAY CHYNOWETH: My only suggestion would be -- I don't know if
you can do a flow chart. But I think that would be a pretty helpful
thing for people to see, in addition to just the language to it.  So --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Great idea.  Okay.  So I think we've moved --
we're further along in this document.  Okay.

Avri, here again you have a comment.

 >>AVRI DORIA:  Me and my comments.  Frustrating me.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Just to clarify what was highlighted in yellow. 
One of them -- one of the things in some of the working groups I've
run where we had, for example, certain proposed changes to the
documents and there were so many changes that we ran a survey,
basically.  And we did -- you know, how do you then assess -- because
you do have -- although it's not voting, but you do have eight people
say they agree; three say they don't agree; one said they strongly
disagree.  You know, do any examples need to be given saying, well,
you know, if it's 90%, you probably have rough consensus.  If it's
75%, then probably it's strong support.  Or is there any guidance we
want to give in examples?  Or is it really left up to the discretion
of the chair to say, "Well, I think 83% is, you know, rough consensus
or 82% is strong support."  Is there anything that should be included
here?  And I think Avri made a comment to that point.  So -- go ahead.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Jonne, can you announce your name for the scribes?

>>JONNE SOININEN:  Yeah, right. Jonne Soininen, Nokia Siemens
Networks.  I'm trying to read what Avri wrote here, and I think I
understand what she means.  Let's see if that's true.  The -- what --
I think what she's pointing out here is, basically, saying that the
chair has to say that, "I declare consensus."  I think that rough
consensus or unanimous consent has been reached.  And the group can
say, "Well, yeah, true."  Or the group can say, "No, hey, wait a
minute.  That's not true."  And, like, we have 50% saying no.  And
you're saying rough consensus, so that's not rough consensus.  And
then the chair can either reconsider, or it goes to appeal.  Wasn't --

 >>AVRI DORIA:  Yeah, that's right.  I would think that the chair
would, obviously, in the first instance reconsider.  But, if after
reconsidering they say:  "No, I still think there is," then I --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I would put to the group that I sort of think
that's better than giving examples is to allow this -- here's what
I've declared and let there be a self-testing back with the group
rather than putting in numbers.  Because you get the numbers game
again.  And that becomes, "Well, I say we have 90," and you get down
to voting.  And -- but --

 >>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  So Gray Chynoweth.  I'm torn on whether to go
with specific numbers or not to go with specific numbers.  Because
it's unclear to me which one in the end will result in less debate. 
So, if you have a specific number and you have a group and you can
figure out whether or not you reach it, that would be a pretty clear
determination.  There's facts on the ground.  

If you put a softer -- you know, "a few," "many" -- you know, if you
use soft terms like that to talk about rough consensus or something
like that, then -- then I think there could be debate about that as
well.  But I don't know if -- to me, I'm -- I would believe that we
would -- that putting in thresholds gets people to start thinking
about this as a voting mechanisms when we're trying to stay away from
it.  But I'm not sure if that really ends up avoiding some of the
debate that's going to happen.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  We're not defining it with "many" or "some" or
anything.  What they're saying is you take the temperature of the
group and you announce to the group "We've decided -- I called for
consensus, and here's my determination based on this."  It's X.  And
the group then reacts to that call, and they -- then the chair has to
reconsider whether they're going to ratchet it up or down, depending
on the pushback they've received.  Or they stick with their call, at
which point the people who disagree could go to the liaison.  And the
liaison could make a call as to whether there's an agreement on that
level.  So what I think they're saying is it's a self-checking
mechanism within the group itself as to whether it's been reached
rather than doing sort of a definition.

 >>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  I think what people will refer back to, though,
is that is the language up in 3?  And that will be the test.  When
I'm a chair, I'll say, "All right, we reached rough consensus."  

Everyone, if they're not sure about that, will then reference -- go
back up to 3 and say, "Wait a minute.  This is what rough consensus
is defined as, and I don't think we reached that.  I think we're at
no consensus."  

So there's got to be some test against which people go back to.  And
I guess the -- you know, the description that's provided above is
going to be the test for what everyone pushes it towards.  But I
think you're right that there will be a feedback loop, and that will
be what determines it.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Subbiah?

>>SUBBIAH S.:  Just as much as -- when we're going through this
whole document, this is the section we said we're going to do last,
because this is going to concern a lot of people in how we're going
to do it.  It's clearly a people issue.  And secondly, we are also
talking about making it flexible for the chair and the working group
itself not to have real bullet numbers, target numbers.  So it seems
to me appropriate that, just as much as we're having a discussion
about this as the last hard thing, in a way, that every working
group, before they begin, the chair sits down.  And one of the first
tasks they do is discuss amongst themselves what do they think that
for this particular working group and this particular combination of
chair and members, what would constitute minority or consensus so
that everybody has some general idea -- once you pre-agreed at some
level, before you start out, without any real examples, leave it up
to the group themselves.  And we just direct them in this process to
say it's a good idea.  In the beginning one of the things you handle
is discuss this through before; so that, when these things do happen
later on, it's less of an issue.  That's just a suggestion, A
guidance thing.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Jaime?

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  I would bring forth my position that I think that
thresholds -- specific thresholds are not needed.  This is a good
guidance.  I think any chair would like to achieve consensus, if it --
well, we have to leave room to do work to be done at the working
group level, not here, you know?  And I don't think we would be able
to reach consensus on each specific level of threshold now would be
suitable.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  How -- I take Subbiah's point.  I put to the
group would you all like to amend up in the document and put in one
of the first steps the chair would do is discuss the consensus model
in 3.6 with the group as one of the checkpoints as initial steps
before you begin substantive work?

>>JONNE SOININEN:  Jonne Soininen.  What I fear or feel is that,
basically, I don't think that that works.  Because the people that
are there in the beginning are then the ones who say, "Well, this is
the consensus or not."  And then somebody comes along and says,
"Well, I wasn't there," and stuff like that.  

The chair having the discretion of saying, "Well, I see in this
situation that there's rough consensus.  We have five people for it
and only two against.  That's, in my view, rough consensus."  And the
group can disagree at that point.

Rough consensus or consensus or -- well, unanimous consensus is, of
course, very clear.  It's also a little bit an issue-driven thing. 
Because, if you have something that is really, really critical and
really difficult to discuss, you might want to say, "Well, 2 against
5 is actually pretty many."  

If it's a minor point, you say, "Well, okay.  Those two lose.  We
just have to move on."  So I would like to give that -- keep that
kind of, like, flexibility.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I just want to clarify my point.  I'm not saying
you define what it is as the working group.  I'm saying you discuss
that this is the model, that you actually put it on the table as an
agenda item.  You don't assume that people have read this document. 
As chair one of your items is to say, "Please understand that we're
going to be working under this.  Please look at 3.6.  Let's have a
little discussion about decision making."

 >>CHERYL LANGDON-ORR:  Thank you, J. Scott.  Cheryl Langdon-Orr. 
When we were discussing this first time around, I did bring forward --
and I'll bring forward again for the wider table here -- that it's
been a very effective tool in the last 10 years for the Australian
domain name authority where we use policy panels.  So it's a very
analogous process to what we're discussing.  And, having a first
agenda item to be the discussion on what the consensus levels will be
for this particular panel is not only a great icebreaker; it actually
works extremely well to get a good dynamic going with the group,
particularly in the more complex issues.  

And, in fact, what we found, if I look back over what people have
come up with -- and these are all independent panels -- they're
incredibly consistent.  You know?  That they may have taken longer or
shorter times to come to the same measurable levels; but they are, in
fact, very consistent.  So I'm certainly supporting having it as a
discussion point.

>>SUBBIAH S.:  May I just add --

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Let Marika respond.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  One concern I would have about putting that as
one of the first items, I've seen how much discussion that led in the
PDP or the PPSC discussions.  And I don't know how many meetings that
took up. Because there were very different views on what's consensus,
rough support, strong support.  So I would have some concerns in
making that one of the first items.  Because there are many issues
that need to be discussed in that first meeting. And often topics
that already will lead to, you know, many different viewpoints.  

And also, to Jonne's point, I would be concerned as well, if you're
really set in stone, like, well, 80% is going to be strong support,
60% is rough consensus.  On those things that are relatively minor,
you might -- you know, make that -- you know, it might differ a bit. 
You say well, this is really not a big deal that people agreed.  We
say okay, we put that in because it's not a major issue.  

So I really like Avri's suggestion -- and I think that's something
that could be fleshed out here in the document -- to say, well, it's
for the chair to announce and give his or her assessment of what
level is reached and make clear as well that the working group has an
opportunity to discuss and debate that, whether that's indeed strong
support or rough consensus.  That's obvious that it's not just the
chair that says, "Okay, this is it, done," that it's a working group
assessment in general.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS: All right.  But my suggestion is -- that's fine. 
I'm not suggesting that you sit down and you figure out a matrix for
what consensus is going to be.  I'm saying that you have a discussion
about this is how we make decisions.  And I just want you to
understand that, when we -- when I do a call for consensus, I'm going
to do a call for consensus.  I'm going to put it back to the group. 
That is your opportunity to tell me whether you disagree.  But it be
a primary agenda item in the early stages, so it doesn't devolve when
you're under time pressure to get your output out and you're having
that discussion, that it's handled early on.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I thought you meant at that stage you wanted the
group to define, like, okay, what percentage qualifies?

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I'm going to put to the group, because I'm not
deciding.  I think Avri's process is the best.  And here's why: 
Because I think that we're not starting in a bubble, in a vacuum. 
We've been doing this a lot already.  So there's already a sense of
what consensus is and how it's worked.  And it seems to be going
smoothly, for the most part.  And I think, as it matures, it will
only get more -- a smoother process because people will have a better
understanding of it.  And so -- I think we're already about 30%
there.  So I don't think this is going to be as conscientious as it
would have three years ago.  And I think leaving it in this
temperature gauging with the group is just better because then you
don't get in an argument about definitions.  And arguments about
definitions have driven so many things off the rail that that's very
difficult.  I think it's best to throw it out to the group and let
the group come back.  And it self-defines itself in that way.  That
was your suggestion.  And I put that to the group.  Do you -- I know
that there's some that feel otherwise.  I'd like to know what the
general feel about that is.

 >>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  I think it's a great idea.  It's just,
basically, walking through the document.  That's really what it is. 
And it's not a -- it's not a discussion as to the content of whether
this is a good idea, bad idea.  This is what the working group
guidelines say.  And so I don't -- maybe we want to -- it may even
make sense to be a little more aggressive on it and say maybe
thresholds aren't a good idea, maybe just walk through it.  Don't get
into a discussion about what any of these mean at this time, but that
it's just a walking through the document, so that you don't
accidentally get into that discussion, which could really derail
things at the outset.  So even give guidance on that.

 >>SUBBIAH S.: I just -- this is exactly what I meant, initially, by
saying look -- the problem is many people come on the working
committees.  They don't know this is the way you're going to be,
essentially, voting down the road, you know?

It's going through the things, so people are aware.  You put a time
limit on this.  You cannot spend more than half a minute on it.  It's
just a way of avoiding some of the problems later down the road. 
And, if problems do occur later down the road, these mechanisms pick
it up.

 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Right.  Jaime.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  I'm in favor of putting this as a first step of
clarification since there is a recommendation not to try to
quantitize, since there are terms here that are alliterative, strong
support, significant opposition, I would -- opposition can be
significant even if it's only one person. Okay?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  So my suggestion as chair to the group -- and I
want to see a nod of heads.  Let's all get our bobble head or do this
(indicating) if you don't agree, yes and no's.  I suggest, Marika,
that we go up and we add that in as an early item and that we then
take Avri's comment and you turn that into a paragraph that explains
the general concept we've done so we can look at the wording of that
since there needs to be some tweaking on the wordsmithing.  We can do
that after we get -- that would be my suggestion.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  To avoid the discussion or thresholds?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS: Absolutely.  So it looks like we have general
consensus.

[Laughter]

A new term.  Now I've really messed you up.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Because I'm just looking back at the document,
and we do have items for review in the first meeting where we do
point out that a working group should review missions, goals,
objectives, deliverables, the working group charter, the working
group operating, the guidebook and all the documents where we could
specify there including decision-making process.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS: Okay.  Let's move up in the document to 4.  I
think a lot of the rest of this is going to be more ministerial, but
we do need to go through it.

Avri, once again, I believe you have a comment, if you could pull
up.  And I thought this was a good point, but I think this has to do
with agenda?

>>AVRI DORIA:  Yeah.  I was just basically saying to have it fixed
as "one day before" is probably not a good rule as sufficiency. 
Obviously, it should be at least that, if anything.  Sometimes, yeah,
one day before is the best you can do.  But...

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  That comes back to the reality of the working
groups as well.  With weekly working groups and many things that you
do, it's often a couple of hours before the working group.  So as
long as we don't put a strong penalty on it.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I think what -- if I take Avri's point, she's
saying don't say it has to be a day before.  She is saying "at
least."  So if I want to do it a week ahead of time, I can.  That's
never going to happen.

[Laughter]

But if I somehow in a different world am a different person, it could.

>>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  This may be overkill; but in response to some
comments that Adrian was making yesterday, if we say "one day," we
may want to say 24 hours because when I think of what "a day" means
to me, I think, okay, wake up -- if we are going to have the meeting
at 5:00 p.m., then I send it out first thing in the morning for me. 
And that's kind of a day ahead.  But obviously that's while he's
asleep.  

So we may want to say that to suggest -- but we may want to suggest
that kind of be the rule to take into account that there could be
multiple time zones.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Ideally.  The practice is often, at least for the
working groups I support, I normally try to get them a day out.  But
I normally sent them first through the chair so they can review. 
Based on their time difference or their availability, you know,
sometimes it does happen that it is only a couple of hours before the
meeting.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Again, this is just a best practice.  We are not
going to send you to the electric chair for this, so "ideally is"
fine.  

Jonne?

>>JONNE SOININEN:  Jonne Soininen.  I don't know about not sending
to the electric chair.  But the thing is that at least we should
thrive for having them ahead of time.  I know that reality is
sometimes different, but this is the current practice that we have
that everything is late.  But maybe sometime in the future we could
get to be better people.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Subbiah?

>>SUBBIAH S.:  You might want some language in there to say the
committee itself can decide what the appropriate time may be but the
one day being the -- yeah...

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That's great.  Let's go up.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  This is just a comment or a placeholder.  We've
put in here some things on the communication and collaboration tools
and just to know that we might need to add further information here
once the OSC communication team is done with their recommendations. 
I think it is something I need to go back on to see if there is
actually going to be anything that might be applicable here.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And I think it's okay if we put out a document
for public comment that notes that we are going to incorporate the
recommendations of other teams when it's been agreed upon that that
will be incorporated in this document.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  So the next point is translation.  And here,
again, a point is made on further information might be added based on
OSC recommendations.  Another point we might need to add here is --
because this is also on the agenda for the PDP work team to look,
like at which documents should be translated.  If they come up with
any binding -- like, any issues report or any final report needs to
be translated, it might be something as well that should be included
here so working groups know what the expectations are.  Also, for
example, for public comment periods if that would be a decision of
that group.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Cheryl?

>>CHERYL LANGDON-ORR:  Thanks, J. Scott.  Wouldn't that also have
some -- there would be some ramifications for whatever happens with
the public participation people's work on having executive summaries
at least translated and using executive summaries and pro forma
documentations.  That's going to be a little open space for "as other
things change, additional information will need to be inserted here."
It just makes it a living document, which I know we have been
intending to do.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  All right.  Jaime?

>>JAIME WAGNER:  [Speaking Portuguese.]

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I think he said, "If you spoke French, you would
understand what I am saying" but I don't know.  Portuguese, French,
it sounds the same when you are from the south.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  What I said is I will give you an example of how
difficult it is to participate in other languages.

>> Well done.

>>CHERYL LANGDON-ORR:  There is no way with all the work and pushing
we do in the ALAC to make sure that we do have at least minimal
requirements that we wouldn't want to be supporting that in this
context.  We're running three languages in all of our meetings,
including our community calls to ensure that our regions are better
able to participate and think it's important as a policy development
process, things that are going on in these work groups.  

There are thorny issues that have to be grappled with.  And I think
ensuring use of language, both simple and making it accessible is
something that we do have to consider along with the cost of doing
so, which is where things like executive summary translation and
future technologies might make translation easier as well.

But it is extremely difficult, and that comes back also to when we
need to ask for longer periods in public comment, for closing of
public comment, because if it's going out and then has to be locally
interpreted or translated and discussed and come back, 30 to even 45
days is still pushing.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  Well, again, we are fully supportive of whatever
determinations are made by the other groups that are going to make
those determinations.  And we are going to put a placeholder in this
document that says, "Once those determinations are made, they will be
specified here so you know as a working group these are your
obligations to make sure that you follow the necessary
recommendations that have been decided upon by the organization as a
whole."

>>JAIME WAGNER:  It was just drama.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  So next sections are 4.4, "briefings and subject
matter experts."  Number 5 is on products and outputs.  This is just
a section to give working groups some examples to look at other
reports that have been done, other documents that have been
developed.  And here also we added a placeholder for whatever the PDP
work team comes up with, what should be final products for PDP work
teams.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I think there's something missing now, and I
think that's self-assessment.  If I'm not correct, isn't one of the
processes now that a working group will at the end of its -- they're
not going to self-assess?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Probably in the future PDP work team, I think
that will be a requirement.  But currently that's not a requirement
and not being done, at least not for the working groups I have been
involved in.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  But it is my understanding that going forward
there's supposed to be self-assessment.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yeah, yeah.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And I would assume for "products and outputs," we
need a bullet point "self-assessment" because that's your last output
as a working group.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  But the links provided here are just examples, so
we might -- you know, once we explain -- I think that comes up in the
PDP description then because I presume the PDP work team might
provide some guidance on what that entails.  So it might be a
separate section where we explain what certain documents need to
contain.  

It's the same, for example -- the ones you provided, I think they
will move to the bottom once we have descriptions of what these
documents mean.  What the PDP work team is looking at -- because the
bylaws currently prescribe certain headings or categories or parts of
information that need to be included in certain documents like an
initial report or final report.

And the PDP work team is looking at that as well.  So I would
definitely foresee once they have finished their work and we create
either a separate annex or integrate in here the specifics for our
PDP work team that we would, indeed, describe what the requirements
are for PDP work team or -- as well provide the example on the self-
assessment, what it entails, what you should do as a working group.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  I would put to the group that eventually there
should be a template for self-assessment because what you want to do
is make this as easy as possible for -- because it is the last thing,
it is the last housekeeping chore.  So the easier you can make it for
the group to get through the process, the more success I think you
will have in actually getting them turned in.

So I would suggest that once -- if there are going to be categories
of things they need to look at, we give them a template.

Ken and then Gray.

>>KEN BOUR:  Ken Bour.  I just wanted to point out that in the
charter drafting guidelines document in Section 4.4, we have a whole
section called, "Closure and Team Self-Assessment."  So this begs the
sort of question we've been toying with for a while, is between the
operating model guidebook and the charter drafting guidelines, the
two documents, we -- there is a task, I think, to try to blend these
together because we have got an output section over here that doesn't
include an output that's in the charter drafting guidelines.  

So that's just -- I just want to make sure you knew that it was
already included in our work, but we haven't put it necessarily in
all the right places.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  We need to put a bullet here that says, "That's
your last deliverable."  Gray?

>>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  I guess we'll just have them -- they will draft
the form and we will plug it in?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  They may not draft a form.  What they may say is
these are the areas, and we will put it into a template similar as we
did the charter template.  I assume it would be very much that, that
we just sort of set it out and make it easy visually to look at
because, you know, it's easier to look at a form than it is to look
at a paragraph that describes what you are going to do, especially if
you have language issues.  And we haven't gotten to -- and so they're
dealing with the document in a separate language and English is their
second language.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  So last item of this document is a chair
checklist.  That was an item that I found in the listing for this
document, but I wasn't really sure what you would like to include
here as many of the elements are outlined in the document.  I'm not
sure which specifics you would like to add to a chair checklist.  

I mean, I could foresee once the PDP work team has done its job that
there would be a clear PDP timetable kind of checklist, like, Did I
do my public comments as prescribed?  

But for other working groups, I'm not really sure whether you can
have a standard checklist of, well, having your first meeting and
things like that.  But I don't know.  The document is not that
lengthy.  I don't know if you really need to include a separate
checklist here.  It's a question for the group.  And if you say yes,
what kind of elements should be in there?

>>JAIME WAGNER:  This is a guideline.  It would be a housekeeping
checklist, I think, for the first meeting and then for other meetings.

>>GRAY CHYNOWETH:  It seems like maybe we could either just strike
this or it would be -- the only thing we would do is it could just be
a form a chair could use when they went over Section 2 for
introductions and team formation just for the things that they need
to talk about.  So that's what you are checking off.  It is part of
your agenda.

I would either say strike it or just make it an attachment.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  That would be my suggestion to the group is that
we strike Section 6 and then in Section 2 we say, "See attachment X"
and then we put a list there that goes through those elements.

With that, I'm happy to say that I think we are finished.  And what
we need to do is have Marika give us a draft, we look at this again,
and we may be at the point where we can start putting these documents
together.

I want to thank everyone for participating today.  

I'm sorry, Subbiah, you are to my left.

>>SUBBIAH S.:  Maybe I didn't catch it, but are we going to make a
self-example of ourselves and have a self-assessment for ourselves?

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  We certainly -- I certainly think that that might
be a good idea.  But what I'd like to do is I would like to get the
documents out to public comment and then we can have a discussion
about that.

>>SUBBIAH S.:  I understand that.  But if we were going to be
preparing something for that, template or something, we would
probably have to do that on the side.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  If I can just -- just to ask a point of
clarification.  You first would like to have a review of an updated
version of this.  And following that, I will make an attempt of
gathering the two documents together into one document, and then we
will be out for final review to the working group -- working team
before it goes out to public comment.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  And because we have moved a lot faster, my sense
as chair is what I would prefer to do is get us comfortable with
this, move the two documents into one and then do our call for
consensus on the document so that we just do it on the full thing
that we are going to put out for public comment.

I would feel much more comfortable that we are all -- that there are
less changes going to happen as things go and we won't lose consensus
that we have, although I think we have a lot of unanimous consensus
with this.

So that's my goal, is for us to look at this.  Get comfortable with
this language.  Then do the merge.  So I'm hoping that, you know, by
three or four weeks we'll have a document that will be in a place for
us to consider.

We will not be having a call, of course, next week because a lot of
people are exhausted and staff is hopefully taking some time off.  So
I will send out something when we return to the states about us
having a call the week after which is going to be the second week of
November.  

And to remind everyone, we did a Doodle poll and the time we have
been having our calls came out again as still being the best time for
everyone who responded to the Doodle poll.  So we will keep our call
at the normal time which is for me 11:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  1800 UTC.

>>J. SCOTT EVANS:  So, thank you, everyone.  We finished early.  We
plowed through.  Our goal was to get through today, and I think we've
done an exceptional job.  And I appreciate everyone very, very much. 
Thank you.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Thanks.

[Applause]

[Break]

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  If I could have your attention, please.  We
are going to start this session.  We have a lot to cover in just an
hour and half, maybe a little bit less now.  So if everyone would
stop their conversations.  I want to share some logistical
information.  So that all of the councillors, both existing and new
councillors that will be seated on Wednesday are easy for the scribes
to see and easy to facilitate their role here, the seats at the table
are primarily reserved for the councillors and incoming councillors. 
So just be aware of that.

The way we're going to do this session is that Kurt is going to just
show some very brief slides focusing on the changes that were made
from Module 3 -- to Module 3 from Module 2.  And then we will have
discussion -- opportunity for questions and answers on that.  We'll
have to monitor our time to make sure we can get to all six modules.

I will ask right up front.  By the way, for those who don't know me,
I'm Chuck Gomes.  I'm the vice chair of the council.  Avri is here at
the moment but she will have to leave in a little bit, so that's why
I'm here.

And I'm going to ask everybody that participates, if you are not at
the table, please queue up at the mic behind us here and I will try
to keep looking around to see when people are there.  Please be
brief.  This is a huge document.  There are lots of issues.  If we
can all be as concise as possible, it will help us to make a lot more
progress.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Kurt to show slides.  I
assume you are starting with Module 1.  Is that right?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Good morning, everybody.  How are you?  Thanks for
having me here to discuss this.

So I had a brief e-mail exchange with Chuck and Avri about what
materials might be presented, and I think as in the past, we really
want to get to clarification of what's going on.  And that's best
achieved through questions and answers about changes to the guidebook.

So that all I've really prepared is a list of what's changed since --
what's changed since last time.  That doesn't mean the questions have
to be confined to that.  The questions can be about anything you
want.  And I'll do my best with Dan and -- I don't know whether other
ICANN staff members are here, but you might see me whip my neck
around on hard questions.

So what have we done since Sydney?  You have contributed a lot of
material in the way of comments, so you've commented on the last
version of the guidebook, which is really a set of excerpts to
guidebook version 2.

You also contributed significant commentary to the IRT report, and
those comment periods closed many weeks ago.  And since that time,
ICANN has done what's become somewhat routine but still quite a bit
of work and that is to take all the public comments and summarize
them and put them into categories so that they can be balanced and
some sort of proposal can be made about changes to the guidebook.

So in this version of the guidebook, there's over 50 substantive
changes.  Some are big and some are not so big, but nearly all of
them are in response to public comment.  So if we were to look -- if
you look at the red-lined version of the guidebook that's posted, you
would see substantial change.  But if you were to look at a red-lined
since the first version of the guidebook, you would just pretty much
see red.  And that is based on two things.  Some is staff continues
to work on procedures and honing, scoring and making things more
clear are for the applicant.  But more significantly, it has changed
as a result of public comment.  And so both the analysis and the --
and all the red in the book is indicative of the fact that public
comment is taken very seriously.  

So you see the draft guidebook in clean and red line.  You see the
public comment summary and analyses for comments about the guidebook,
comments about the IRT report.  Also, there was a comment summary on
the terms of reference to the root-scaling study, which is kind of
old news.

As usual, there's explanatory memoranda that explains several
aspects of the guidebook.  If you were to add up all the explanatory
memos that were published to explain the thinking behind what's in
the guidebook, I think you're probably in the 20s.  So there's been
considerable work there.  And then there's several independent
reports, and those are two of them.

So if you want, we can go to the Web site and kind of see what's --
you know, how things are organized.  But, instead, since we have
minimal time, unless somebody raises their hand and says they want to
do that...

Module 1 -- everybody knows that Module 1 is sort of the overall
process outline overall and describes to the applicant the process
through which the application will travel as it is considered and
evaluated and what the duties of the applicant are in applying for a
new TLD.

I don't know -- I'm sitting here looking at both screens going back
and forth.  I don't know why.

So what are the changes in Module 1?  We provided a great deal of
specificity about how long it will take to process an application,
both the most straightforward applications and the more complex ones
that will go through some sort of dispute resolution procedure.

We've always talked about a problem with the word "open TLD" versus
"community-based" as if a community-based TLD is not open.  So now
that's standard, so that's not so significant.

There is a description in Module 1 and more of a description later
on about certain TLDs that might want to self-identify and then
validate that they are a high-security zone option.  That came out of
comments we received.

And then there's some clarity about fees, how much -- you know, how
much they are, when deposits need to be paid for different dispute
resolution processes.  And I think we got rid of the 100 bucks to get
into the application system.

So that's not too much, but that's what's changed in Module 1.  But
if anybody has any questions at all about that, I'd be happy to take
them.  

Do you want to run the queue, Chuck?

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Sure.  I will try to keep track of that.  So for
those behind us here -- behind me here at the table, if you do have a
question, please line up at either one of the mics on the left or
right side and I will try and keep track of those.  

And then, of course, councillors at the table are free to identify
yourself.  

So do we have any questions regarding Module 1 changes?  Okay, I've
got Mike and Kristina.  All right.  

Go ahead, Mike.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  I noticed in the new draft that you said if
there's 400 applications, then it would take six to eight months to
do initial evaluations.  Just wondering what happens if there is
1,000 applications or 2,000 applications, what you're planning to do
in order to scale that.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Then I think it's clear there needs to be some sort
of batching of the applications and a process will need to be devised
that's not too difficult but to create those batches in a fair way.

The process that -- We've done quite a bit of study about this.  The
process doesn't scale infinitely.  Once you get to about 400 or 500
applications, you've got about 70 technical evaluators.  So it gets
to the point where it's hard to coordinate and normalize the scoring
across all those evaluators, and the process would tend to break down
a little bit.

So balancing, doing all the applications in a short period of time
against consistency of scoring, you know, there's a management
judgment that that's about the maximum number, 4-, 500 that can be
processed in parallel.  

If the final number is right around that, we will make every effort
to process them all in parallel; but that's the thinking behind that.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay, thank you.  Just a second, Kristina.  I just
want to give some instructions.  Whoever it is, even those on the
council, if you would please identify yourself for the sake of the
scribes.  They may know a lot of the councillors, but the other
people in the audience may not know you.  So please remember to
identify yourself, and I think those at the table -- everybody at the
table is a councillor, so I don't think you have to name your
affiliation.  But if others would, that would be helpful.

Thank you, Kristina.

>>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  Kristina Rosette.  I had a question regarding
the text regarding objection filing under 1.1.24.  I just want to
make sure I'm clear in understanding that the objection filing period
is 90 days, which will extend for at least two weeks beyond when the
initial evaluation period closes.  Is that a correct kind of
understanding of what's in here and then what's later in the dispute
section?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah.  It's intended to go just beyond the evaluation.

>>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  It is a 90-day period.  Because a lot of people
have gotten really panic-stricken about the "two week" reference.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay, Richard.

>>RICHARD TINDAL:  Richard Tindal from eNOM.  It is just an
observation I want to make really with respect to Mike's question.  I
think if the number of applications goes from 500 to 1,000 or even
2,000 or even 10,000, whatever, if there is only, there will only be
a finite number of back-end providers in my opinion -- this is my
opinion -- generally speaking.  So I don't think if there was a
significantly number large of applications that the technical
evaluation is going to be -- that we are going to have a scaling
issue.  

If we go from 500 apps to 1,000 apps, I don't think there is twice
as many sort of technical back-end providers probably in my opinion. 
I don't think there is going to be that same sort of scaled issue you
are talking about there.  On the financial evaluation perhaps.  

My presumption there is the back-end stuff kind of looks the same
for each application which, again, in my opinion it is going to.  So...

>>KURT PRITZ:  I think that's right.  There is two stages to this
evaluation, right, Richard?  There is the evaluation of the
application, which is a bunch of promises by the applicant and then
there is the pre-delegation testing that occurs that ensures that the
applicant is living up to his promises, or her promises, to meet the
criteria set -- the technical criteria set out in the guidebook.  

So if there is a scarce resource for back-end providers, then that
would be sort of a self-limiting or a gate on delegations because
they would still have to people the performance criteria.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Adrian.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  I just wanted to make a comment, actually.  I
would like to commend ICANN staff on the inclusion of the time lines
to tell you the truth the document.  We've referred to weeks and
months, I think that's extremely helpful to us working with
applicants.  So I just wanted to commend staff on the inclusion of
those in this version.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Edmon.

>>EDMON CHUNG:  I brought up this, I think, last time in Sydney as
well, this consideration about names that might collide with IDN
ccTLD fast-track names.  I know there's a section in there later on,
but what about refund considerations for those kind of situations
where I put in the application not knowing that there's some
application in the process already for IDN ccTLD fast track and it
happens to collide with it?  Shouldn't there be some special refund
consideration for those?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah.  Maybe.  We'll take a note of that.  And you
should make a comment about that, too.

So it's sort of like late-breaking news, right?  You've decided not
to go for a refund, you've decided to pursue your application through
the process and near the end there's a collision with an IDN ccTLD.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Another suggestion.  Kurt just made it to Edmon, but
I'm going to make it generally.

For those of you who do have comments, it will be in the transcript
and will be recorded, so that's good, but it's advisable to also
submit that comment in the comment forum.  So please remember to do
that.

Okay.  Next in the queue is Mike.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  I guess it's really two comments, although I'd
love to have your reaction or thinking behind the changes I've seen.

In 1.1.2.4, you are giving only two weeks to file an objection from
the date the initial evaluation results are posted.  I think that
that is a ridiculously short amount of time to file 5,000-word
objection that has to be complete with all of your evidence, et
cetera, et cetera.  It's -- half the time you have to respond -- it's
just a ridiculous amount of time, a short amount of time.  So I'm
just -- how did you come to that number?

>>KURT PRITZ: Don't know.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So I think the intent is, it's really you have
months to do it, because you see the application and then you have
months while the whole initial evaluation is going forward, and then
it's sort of a -- you have a last-minute check to see, "Well, wait,
maybe they won't pass initial evaluation."  

But -- so you get a last-minute decision like do I file, do I not
file.  They might fail the initial evaluation and you might decide
not to file your objection but you've had months to see who the
applicant is, see what their plans are for the string, see if it
collides with your rights or whatever the grounds for objection are.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  So you've just worked up a huge complaint and
then it doesn't pass initial evaluation, so you've just wasted a lot
of time and money and effort?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah, so that's a balancing, and you should comment
on it.  The balancing is that versus adding in another month into the
evaluation process, so that's -- so what we -- what we strove for
there was to make sure there was adequate time to write an objection,
but requiring some work in parallel with the idea that there might be
breakage.

So if you think, you know -- if you think that that balancing wound
up with the wrong conclusion, that's what you -- that's what you
should say.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  All right.  I think it should be a month, at
least.

Okay.  1.5.1, it's -- this also seems fairly new language, I think,
but it really makes it seem like difficult applications are
subsidized very heavily by easy applications to get through.  And I'm
wondering if there couldn't have been more effort to make -- to shift
that burden, cost burden, to the parties that deserved it.

You know, I'm just thinking dot brand applicants, for example, and
those could be a lot cheaper, perhaps, since typically those are
going to be easy, rather than more technically difficult ones.

>>KURT PRITZ:  You know, I -- I think that's right and there was a
lot of effort expended and discussion about whether to parse the
application fees into more of a pay-as-you-go and I think we'll
evolve to that in subsequent rounds but given there's a huge amount
of unknowables here and what we're trying to do is spin up, you know,
some certainty for the applicant in what it's going to cost them to
apply, and I think going to school on the first round will allow us
to do some of the things you're talking about, Mike.

So again, a lot of these decisions are 60/40 decisions where half of
us or 40% of us are sitting around the table saying exactly what you
said and, you know, 40-some-odd are saying the other thing.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Stéphane.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Thanks, Chuck.  Stéphane Van Gelder.  Just
one administrative suggestion.  Seeing we've got two screens that are
showing the same thing and we've got scribes, for the non-English
speakers in the room, it might be helpful if there was a scribe feed
up there on one of the screens.  I don't know if that's possible or
not, but it might be useful.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  I'll let the technical folks work on that
while we go ahead and proceed.  It's a good suggestion.  I like it. 
But we'll just go ahead and keep going while they see if that's a
possibility.  Okay?

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Thanks.  So on 1.4.2, Kurt, first of all, I
want to join Adrian in commending staff on the work that's been done
on this third version.  It's very impressive.  And it's also very
useful, because there's a lot of detail in there that we didn't have
before that makes it easier to explain what applicants will have to
do in detail, so that's very good.

Just a quick question on that application form.  Is it your
intention in the final version of the applicant guidebook to include
the full detail of the application form?  Because I -- the way I see -
- the way I understand this one, it's just an overview of what's
required.

Will the full application form be in the final version?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Well, the content of the application form is -- we
intend the annex to Module 2, where all the questions are, those are
all the questions, starting from name, address, and so on.

So the content of the form, on the format of the online form, I
think -- I think that would probably -- in the final version, that
would be included, yeah.  And with the final form, the online version
will be available for viewing, too.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  We have one more person in queue and then
we're going to move to Module 2.  So Kristina, you're the last one in
Module 1.

>>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  To the extent that an applicant designates in
its application that it intends to seek a security verification, will
the fact of that designation be published as part of the application
information?

>>KURT PRITZ:  I think so.  I think it's always intend -- you know,
it's meant to be transparent.  It's not scored, but it's going to be
part of the application.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Kurt, let's go to Module 2.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So I understand the IDNA protocol is done.  Is that
true?  So the algorithm now has 8 scripts.  The algorithm's used to
inform examiners who make the decision whether strings will likely
result in string confusion.

So that algorithm that provides a numerical value of visual
similarity covers eight scripts, and the algorithm compares strings
among scripts as well as in scripts.  So it's my secret goal someday
that there's just a numerical answer to that and then that inquiry is
over with, but I don't know if that will ever happen.

The IDNA protocol is -- is very near to complete.  The guidebook
reflects the latest thinking, the version of the IDNA protocol that
went into final call.

So the string requirements, I think, are pretty close to baked.

In geographical names protections, the board called for a
modification to the definition of a country or territory name away
from a meaningful representation or what's in the IDN fast track to
specific lists, and so geographical names that get protections are
now on specific lists and we've also heightened the document
requirements so that the government giving approval has to indicate
in its letter it knows exactly what it's doing and we put time limits
on us, on a TLD applicant getting that government approval.

There's a registry services inquiry as part of the evaluation, and
that is the same as the RCEP, the so-called funnel, and that is part
of the application.  The applicant identifies registry services and
there's a check done to make sure that they are not -- their registry
services would not be risky to DNS stability or security.

And then quite a bit is written about the selection of the
evaluation panels.  That's intended to be a very transparent process.
There's a Web page dedicated just to that.  There's extensive writing
about conflicts of interest, how that's to be handled, and how that's
to be avoided, and also a code of conduct for panelists that serve on
the evaluation panels.

So those are -- those are essentially the changes to Module 2.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  I have one person in queue already.  If
anybody else would like --

>>KURT PRITZ:  And there's more changes to Module 2 to come and
that's the evaluation criteria themselves so we're going to talk
about that next.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Would you like to talk about that next?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Sure.  If it's all right with everybody here.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Go ahead.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah.  So, you know, evidently we've clarified the
process for proof of establishment, legal establishment, and good
standing, to make it more understandable in all the different
regions, although I can't spin up what that is.

There's, I think, eight changes in the guidebook, all told, to
address the potential for malicious conduct and additional inquiries
there.

The technical criteria, we've put some specificity around the RFC
references in response to public comment.

The community -- you know, we have a community-based definition that
if you're applying for a community-based TLD and we've changed the
wording of that to align it with the comparative evaluation criteria,
so -- so there's more of a one-to-one correspondence there.

Last time we talked about protection of a specified list of country
names at the second level, and a sort of dot info procedure.

Financial -- oh, so the financial instrument, there's -- the
financial instrument is intended to sustain registry operations, in
the event that a registry fails, and we kind of think it's the
biggest protection for registrants in this, and think it's a very
important part of the application.

So we've provided a great deal -- you know, if you get one of these
financial instruments, which an applicant will have to, this is how
you'll qualify.

And then we just try to make it more clear what was expected in the
financial statements and again, I talked about registry services
definition before, but we put some clarity around that.

Anyway, so that's everything.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  All right.  Would anybody else want in the
queue?  Okay.

And again, those of you behind me here, you can line up at either
mic if you want in the queue and I'll fit you into the queue as we go
along.

Let's start off with Adrian.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Thanks, Chuck.  My question is about the reviews
and the ability or potential for these reviews -- potential -- more
over the financial and technical reviews to be done in isolation.

If I'm an applicant submitting multiple applications, what about the
-- is there due consideration going to the fact that I might be using
the same financial instrument for 30 applications, understanding that
I may only get a few of those?  And I -- I guess the same works for
the technology as well.  Here's my registry system that I am going to
build and support it, but if you put five registries on that, that's
going to require, you know, a different sort of infrastructure, a
more robust sort of infrastructure.  

So I guess my question is:  Is there -- is there a consideration of -
- especially when these panels may be independent of each other, that
you're going to be batching up applications from the same applicant,
or is there -- is there an ability for an applicant to leverage, for
example, the same financial instruments or same technology within
applications.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So I think that's addressed in a couple ways, and I'm
not a banking guy, but a great deal of attention was paid to a form
of credit, say, that has to be secured and who is identified as the
beneficiary in the letter of credit, and then it gets tied to a TLD
specifically, so the way that's written one is one way.  

And the other way is, remember we've got this pre-delegation check
before the thing goes live, and the only nontechnical aspect of that
is to ensure that this financial instrument is in place.  So I think
it has to be tied to that TLD.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  But in order to get to the technical test, you
have to show that you have technical capability.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Right.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  So you'd need to do -- okay.  So you're saying
that the scalability of that is tested at the pre-delegation test.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Right.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Got it.  Thanks.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Stéphane.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Thanks, Chuck.  So I'm thinking that in some
cases, and I'll give you a specific example, staff may have gone too
far in trying to satisfy the requirements, maybe, of the GAC or
certain parties on geographical names.

A specific example might be I'm looking at the red-line version, so
Page 63.  There's -- towards the bottom of the page -- an addition
there that says that basically you have to seek the -- at least the
non-objection of any local authority that has -- that would have a
similar string to yours.

So --

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Stéphane, if you can give him the section reference,
because he doesn't have the red-line version, okay?

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Okay.  No, it doesn't -- that doesn't
correspond to -- the section reference is 2.1.1.4.1.

[Laughter]

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  You asked.  

And that is towards the bottom there, but not quite.  Just before
2.1.1.4.2.  

And it says, "In the event that there is more than one relevant
government or public authority for the applied-for gTLD string, the
applicant must provide documentation of support or non-objection from
all the relevant governments or public authorities."

So that basically means if you have a city TLD, for example, that
you want to apply for and you are a major city and there's lots of
smaller cities in the world that have the same name, and they would
never have applied, they can basically block you from applying. 
Isn't that going too far?  

Wouldn't it be more sensible to request the applicants, such
applicants to maybe include in their rules for their TLD something
that would allow the other cities to participate or something that --
this clause means that -- you know, someone will -- any New York will
be able to block New York, even though they have no intention of
actually going for the names themselves.

 >>KURT PRITZ:  So I don't know exactly why this provision is here,
but I know it's here for a reason.  But remember that city names
aren't protected.  So that -- so we're really talking about country
names, territory names. Capital city names have protections, but
those are the only ones.  So then I'm wondering if this is -- if,
say, it's a capital city name, if -- if it's -- if somehow it's known
that the government of Paris and the government of France both want a
say-so.  But I've got your question, and I'll find that specific
reason why that's here because it's a good one.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  Mike Rodenbaugh, but, again, be as brief as you can
because we have six modules to go through.

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  I always try to be brief, Chuck.  

String similarity, one of my favorite topics.  2.1.1.  Still just
saying visual similarity in the initial evaluation, which I think is
contrary to the council's recommendations, original recommendations. 
So still disappointing to see that that way after a lot of comments.

Then, when you go to the objection section, which is 2.1.1.1.3 --
2.1.1.1.3, yeah -- where you can object based on a similar meaning,
it's still pretty unclear, I think, in the guidebook.  I think we
need to give more clear guidance as to certain things that will or
will not be deemed confusingly similar, rather than leaving it up to
objection panels. Specifically, I'm thinking of scenarios that we
talked about hundreds of times in the last three years, especially
translations of terms.  So dot empleo or dot viaje in Spanish are the
equivalence of dot travel and dot jobs.  Are those confusingly
similar in the staff's opinion or not?  Why don't we know that?  Very
similar things like we also have the letter, I think, from dot sport
saying that dot basketball must not be allowed for various reasons. 
I'm not sure that's really part of confusing similarity but also
ought to be addressed so that the community knows what staff is
thinking there.  And, you know, I could go on and on.  There's no
more type of equivalence -- dot music, dot tunes, et cetera, et
cetera.  So how is that going to work?

 >>KURT PRITZ:  Two questions: so the GNSO recommendation about
string confusion is addressed by the objection-based process where
all types of confusing criteria -- "all" meaning visual -- are
addressed.  So we think that's addressed fully.  And the prereview
during the evaluation is meant to weed out those applications that
are identical or very similar visually, which is a relatively easy --
it's an easier inquiry to undertake.  So we undertake it for all
applications at that stage in order to avoid situations where
applications go down the path and then are objected to later.  Are
translations confusing?  You know, I don't know.  We're more -- we're
focused on the answer, right?  We're focused on the result is will
users be confused -- is it likely that users will be confused by the
delegation in the root zone?  So I can think of translations that may
result in confusion.  And I can think of translations that I don't
think will.

But it's -- it's -- this is -- this occurs throughout the guidebook.
It's hard for staff or others to put examples in the guidebook when --
you know, even in the case of examples, you know, there's innovative
arguments that can be made or arguments that can be made that aren't
thought of by those putting the examples forward.  So understanding
that examples are very helpful, they can also, you know, in the end
have the opposite effect.  So I think that some translations would be
confusing and some would not.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thanks, Kurt.  Go ahead, Dan.  

>>DAN HALLORAN:  Just because the phrase popped up in your question,
Mike.  What does staff think?  

It doesn't matter what staff thinks.  It matters what's in the
guidebook and what standards we make.  Staff isn't going to make the
decisions.  If we don't give examples or don't give guidance, the
objection panels are going to make these decisions.  And it doesn't
matter what Kurt thought six months or a year ago.  It matters what's
in the guidebook.  So, if we don't see something in the guidebook
that you think should be there, we need to comment or -- if it wasn't
in the policy recommendation or not in the guidebook now, it doesn't
matter what any of us at the table thinks.  Those decisions are going
to be made by an evaluator a year or two from now.

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  There have been a lot of comments along these
lines.  In fact, our original recommendations had language around
these issues, particularly translations, I believe.  So I just think
that we're leaving it way too open, too much risk for people that are
going to shell out 185 grand and not really know what's going to
happen in that situation. Because, basically, any application could
be challenged on the grounds of confusing similarity.  Because,
obviously, every word or term -- at least every English word or term
can be translated into any number of other languages.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Let's move on now.  I'm going to read off
the queue that I have.  And I'm going to close it off there, because
we need to get through the other modules.  So I have Kristina, Edmon,
Mike Palage, Richard Tindal, Adrian, Kurt, and Amadeu.

So we're going to close it off for module 2 there, and then move on
to module 3.  Kristina?

 >>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  All right.  First one suggestion and then some
questions.  I think it would be helpful for those folks who don't
spend as much time in ICANN land as we do to include in the next
draft of the guidebook very specific links to the ISO lists that
contain relevant geographic locations because those, frankly, are not
easy to find, even if you know what you're looking for.  

First question is that one of the IRT's recommendations was that the
-- that there be created a request for reconsideration process that
would apply to all applicants whose applications fail the initial
examination on the grounds of string similarity.  That recommendation
is not in here, and I have yet to find any explanation as to why it
was rejected.  Can we -- is there an explanation for that?

 >>KURT PRITZ:  There's a brief explanation for it in the comments
section to the IRT report.  That's -- but I will -- that's sort of --
sort of occurred near the end of the process.  And I'll work to get
you a better explanation of that too.

>>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  Thanks.  Second, in regard to -- let me find
the right section.  In section 2.3.3, the code of conduct guidelines
for panelists, there's a reference that panelists have to act in
accordance with the new gTLD application program conflicts of
interest.  Is that new gTLD application program conflicts of
interest, is that the context that appears at 2.3.4, or is that some
other document?

 >>KURT PRITZ:  Is there somebody behind me that can answer that?

 >>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  In 2.3.3 there's a reference to a new gTLD
application program conflicts of interest.  The very next sentence,
the very next section has kind of a relevant text but not exactly the
same title.  So I'm just trying to figure out if those are, in fact,
the guidelines.

 >>KURT PRITZ:  I think it is, but I'll get a clarification for
this.  I'm almost sure it is.  So we will -- excuse me.  And we'll
clarify -- we'll change the title to ensure that there's direct --

 >>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  Okay.  

My next question/suggestion would be that the conflict of interest
guidelines for panelists should also include prohibitions relating to
whether or not the panelist, you know, satisfies any of these
criteria with regard to an existing contracting party, I believe.

 >>KURT PRITZ:  Sorry.  You're making a suggestion for augmentation?

 >>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  Yeah.  That, with regard to the conflict of
interest guidelines for panelists, I think, to the extent that you've
got specific criteria about not being under contract for professional
services for the applicant, not currently wholly being committed to
give any -- da, da, da -- but I think, given that there appears
likely to be such overlap between existing contracted parties and
entities that might be providing back end registry services, that I
think one way to take into account potential conflicts of interest
there is to just, you know, have the prohibition.

 >>KURT PRITZ:  But, overall, it's pretty good, huh?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  Edmon.

>>EDMON CHUNG:   Two questions.  First one is my favorite question,
and the first one actually has two components.  One, the three-
character limitations on IDN, I understand there's a group talking
about it.  I wanted to know when we can get some update on that.  The
second component is about variance for IDN TLD strings, especially in
the case of simplified and traditional Chinese.  I want to raise the
point that what may work for ccTLDs may not work for gTLDs because
the target community is global for gTLD, whereas, in ccTLDs you might
be looking at a simplified Chinese area, for example, Mainland China
and the traditional Chinese area, for example, in Taiwan where
traditional gTLD you have to look at both together.  So variant
becomes an issue.  And, if you deal with it as a reserved name, it
may not work.  It definitely will not work, I should say, at least
for us.  Second question --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  Sorry.

>> That was already two questions.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  Let him respond to that, Edmon, and you'll still be
on queue to get the question.

 >>KURT PRITZ:  That was one question?  So in 1a, yes, that working
group has been working on lifting the prohibition on three-character
names in certain languages and has drafted a report that I think is
going to be released during this meeting that describes a model for
allowing two-character registrations in certain cases, especially,
say, where it's not -- there assuredly would not be confusion with
ASCII two-character names.  

I would think that group would probably say that the release of
single-character names probably requires more policy work.  So we'd
be reticent about releasing single-character names in certain scripts
but would have a model for discussion about the release of two-
character names.  And I understand your point about variance exactly.
Well, I'm not so good at variance.  But simplified Chinese and
traditional Chinese.  The word for "China" is not, to my
understanding, very similar.  They're different.  So there's not
string confusion aspects with that.  So there's a way to delegate
those two strings, I think.  Whereas -- not as variants but just as
separate TLDs.  Whereas, you know, with other Chinese words, you
know, variants can be confusing.  So in time for the new gTLD
process, that issue will have to be worked out.  But I don't think
that group got to a final model on variant management yet.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:  Okay.  Good.  My second question is on the
geographic names.  I see that in this version there's a change in
terms of -- originally, you were saying that situations like dot Asia
for region, that substantial amount of support from the governments. 
And now I see a specific percentage, which is 69%, if I remember
correctly.  Where did that particular percentage come from, and
what's the rationale behind it?

 >>KURT PRITZ:  It came from analysis and having people look at the
number of governments in every region, which varies widely, and what
seemed to be a reasonable percentage of support so that, you know,
there's -- comment and other people make cases that you should get
complete support.  And others think maybe 50% or even less.  And this
was a balancing -- this was a balancing of those comments.  So before
you -- before you react to it, I would go back, look at the number of
governments or territories or countries in each region and see how
many you would need the support of in each region and say does that
make sense or does that make sense?  And then, if you want to suggest
a different model, go about it --

 >>EDMON CHUNG: And of course I did.  Especially for the case for
Asia, it definitely wouldn't work for us.  And, if you look at the
case for dot Asia, I would venture to say that I think a lot of
people in the community thinks that we've done a good job and we've,
you know, included a lot of people and including governments in our
discussions.  And, for us, there are actually 73.  And 69% would be a
huge number.  And, as you have mentioned, that the situation is
different for different regions, I would, you know, sort of think
that a sort of balanced approach would be that on a case-by-case
basis rather than a particular percentage across the board.  So, if
you ask me, you know, that's really what I think is more of a
balanced approach rather than having a particular percentage.  

The other part -- sorry.  Just quickly.  The other part is that you
might want to think about whether it -- how -- if you must put a
percentage, how -- you know, that percentage, you know, what does it
mean?  Does it mean, for example, the Internet user population, how
does that reflect on the representation that you're representing in
terms of the region?  That, you know, might be a good indicator as
well.  So --

 >>KURT PRITZ:  And the balancing is, you know, 69% of 73 is a big
number.  But 31% of 73 is 21 or 22 countries that don't -- you know,
that, essentially, don't voice support for the TLD.  So that's a huge
number, too.  So, as we continue our discussion, we'll have to talk
about that.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:  I mean, if I may just point out one thing, is that,
you know, if you look at ICANN's own GAC members, does it represent
69% of all the countries in the world?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Let's go on.  Thank you.  Thank you, Edmon.  

I want to deal with a logistical -- a logistical issue here.  It's
becoming very clear that we're not going to make it through all six
modules.  I can still cut off the queue and -- like I already cut
this one off with Amadeu.  Or we can just go as far as we can get and
allow all comments.  

Just by a show of hands, how many would rather deal with as much as
we can and not cut off the queue for each module?  If you're in favor
of that -- and I'm not seeing many hands.  So you'd rather we cut off
the queue and move forward.  Is that correct?

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE: Is it possible for ICANN staff to provide a
follow-up session so we can ask the questions?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  By the way, I have the following people in queue
still:  Mike Palage, Richard Tindal, Adrian, Kurt, and Amadeu.  What
I'm seeing is we'll cut off the queue. Obviously, the schedule is
really challenging, I know.

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Are you having another session on Monday, Chuck?

>>CHUCK GOMES:  What's that?

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Are you presenting this material, Kurt, on
Monday and to the public?

 >>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah.  It's -- it's a different sort of presentation.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:  I doubt if there's nearly as much time for Q&A as
the issue.  So let's -- let's regroup on that.

You know, we can think through alternatives in terms of dealing with
this.  Because I think this is very good.  I'm not critical of what's
happening here.  I think it's very, very constructive.  But we'll
have to deal with that.  I have the sense that most people would
rather cut off the queue.  So there are five people left on queue
here.  Mike Palage, you're next.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:  Thank you.  Mike Palage.  My question, Kurt,
deals with the questions in the appendix to Number 2 regarding
malicious conducts, the questions asked of applicants regarding
financial misactivities, cybersquatting, et cetera.  Compliment
staff.  I think that's a positive set of questions to be asking.  

My question or concern is, the way I read the question right now, it
only deals with an ownership interest of 15%.  So that is a situation
where ICANN may deny an application.

My question is, should ICANN also be looking at a situation where
the people running the TLD may have similar violations?  Because
right now you could have people that have had violations running it
but as long as they don't have an ownership interest, ICANN does not
have the ability to deny that application.  So I think that's --

>>KURT PRITZ:  So you are kind of going, like, after the delegation?
I think before the delegation, there is just kind of owners and not
much else, right?

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:  Well, I would disagree because part of what an
applicant has to do is he has to list who the key personnel are going
to be.

>>KURT PRITZ:  You think it should be expanded to that?

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:  I think it would be helpful.  I don't think it
would look good for ICANN to be allocating TLDs and to have the
senior management have, if you will, a negative track record.  I
think restricting to just ownership was a positive step, but you
potentially might want to look at a broader application to do so.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thanks, Mike.  Richard?  Okay.  Adrian?

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  To follow up on Mike's point earlier, with
respect to trying to give as much information to a potential
applicant prior to submitting an application, I noticed under the
objection, you can object under "means the same as an existing TLD."  

Would it be possible -- well, yeah, would it be possible for
existing TLD registries to provide a definition of what their TLD
means?

>>KURT PRITZ:  I guess they would in answer to the objection, right?

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  But that means I've submitted my application
already and I've paid my money.  I would like to be able to go back
to my clients, for example, and say, "Well, you know what?  You
realize you will be conflicting with "--

>>KURT PRITZ:  This goes back to Mike Rodenbaugh's question earlier
about somebody's laying out $185,000 and they want some certainty
about what the test is going to be.  So I understand that concern,
and I don't know quite what to do with it.  But we'll certainly
consider how to address that issue.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Is it unreasonable, you think, to ask registries
to do that?

>>DAN HALLORAN:  Yeah, I just don't know to what extent you'd get
participation or how well -- why it would necessarily be
determinative what the registry says.  I think we could probably all
debate, and I have seen debates for hours, on what is dot org for? 
Is "org" for organizations or organizations of individuals or is it
assorted, miscellaneous?  So I think it's an interesting question.  I
just don't know how far we'd get with it.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay, thank you.

Dirk?

>>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:  Okay.  Following Stéphane and, quote, on the
protection of capital names, if you read the guidebook carefully, you
see that the capital names are not specially protected.  So no one
can save dot Paris or dotBERLIN or dot London.  Maybe there's a Paris
in Texas applying with approval of the government of United States,
and they are in competition to Paris in France.  And they would go to
auction maybe at the end of the day.

So there might be some clarity on the special protection of capital
names in the guidebook.  That's not foreseen in that guidebook at the
moment.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So I don't quite get your question, Dirk.  So in the
guidebook, it says capital cities require the approval of the
relevant government.

>>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:  But capitals are not more protected than any
other city.  It is a city name.  So there might be a Paris in Texas,
as I said, applying for that.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So in the guidebook, Paris is protected because it is
a capital city name.

>>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:  It doesn't seem -- if you read the guidebook
carefully, it isn't really protected to prevent other cities with the
same name to apply with the support of the relevant government then. 
So there might be a special protection area for those capital names.

>> RICHARD TINDAL:  I think you meant "preference."

>>KURT PRITZ:  So I think Paris, Texas, would need the support of
the Paris, France government that capital, in the limited case of
capital cities, it was thought that -- or it was recommended that
governments have a special interest in their capital city.  And so
those capital city names are sought -- requires the approval of that
government, the government where the capital is.

>>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:  Okay.  Thanks for the clarification.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So that needs to be clarified.

>>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:  Yeah, okay.  Thanks.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Chuck, can I ask a follow-up on that?

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Yes.  Go ahead.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Just to make sure to understand what you
said, Kurt, do you mean in that ranking order a capital city like
Paris would go before -- if you get Paris, Texas, and Paris,France,
Paris, France automatically goes through?  

>>KURT PRITZ:  Whichever one has the approval of the government --
of the French government.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Just one more clarification.  Does the capital
cities, is that just of national governments?  Yes, thank you.  Amadeu.

>>AMADEU ABRIL i ABRIL:  Thanks a lot.  First a clarification for
Chuck.  It is not capital of national stage or wherever.  It is just
capitals of the territories that are in this famous list, not all of
them being countries.  But anyway...

I have a follow-up comment on the question if you remember 2.1.1.4,
at the end, I read you the sentence:  "In the event that there is
more than one relevant government or public authority for the applied-
for gTLD string" -- and then in this case all the letters have to be
there, you said you knew there was a good reason.  And the good
reason I submitted to you in writing when I asked you this question
through e-mail was probably you were thinking about the vertical
thing.  That is, City of Brussels plus the metropolitan area is now
called Region of Brussels.  But there is also the capital Brussels of
a different region, which is Flanders, is the capital of a different
public authority and territorial base which is the French-speaking
community in Belgium and the Kingdom of Belgium, but not official
capital of the European Union.  So their agreement should not be on
the file.  

So with these five letters, it would be okay because in vertical
they have all of them.  This is very sensible, and I support that.

The second question is I would say collateral -- I mean, the
lateral, horizontal continuous situation.  Tyrol, indeed, is a
province state in Austria but it is also a region in Italy.  So you
would have both of them because it applies to that territory.

What does not make any sense is that you apply that to completely
discontinuous horizontal situations, that is dot Paris and Paris for
all the Paris in Idaho, Illinois, Ontario, Kuravas (phonetic),
wherever.  So if I apply for dot Paris for Paris Hilton or dot Paris
because Paris (different pronunciation) written the same way in
French is "bets," gambling, I don't need the permission of any of
them.  But if I apply for Paris, the city in Paris, I need the
permission.  I'm sure you are not intending to say that.  

My contribution is that if that was the case, I'm completely sure
you were thinking about the vertical case, although for that
territory you change TLD string for territory in that definition
because this is what you meant, not as a string but that territory.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Amadeu is correct.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  We are going to move now to Module 3.  You got the
gist of that?  Okay, thank you.

Go ahead and do Module 3.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So Module 3, there's more material about the
independent objector and how that would be created.  As part of the
comment about morality and public order objections, we've instituted
a quick-look procedure in order to weed out objections that might be
frivolous.

In this version of the guidebook, it's posted that a running list of
objection be published as soon as the objection's made and not wait
until the end of the objection period.  So those others who might be
thinking about objecting can see support for their objection or make
a decision on whether or not to object.

There is a great deal of information about the selection process for
providers and making sure that's posted.  There's clarity provided
about the community objector -- objection standard.  And then,
finally, there's -- and the defenses to community objection, it is
specified that -- there has always been a complete defense to a
community objection, but -- and that complete defense has been
satisfying the standing requirements.  But it's been clarified that
only a community-based applicant can assert this complete defense and
he has to affirmatively approve it.

So those are really general descriptions of items that need to be
read in order to understand them fully.  I didn't do a great job of
explaining the detail behind each one there.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  All right.  Are there any questions or comments on
Module 3?  I saw Stéphane, Mike.  Okay.  

Stéphane, go ahead.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Thank you.  Two short questions.  Start with
in 3.1.3, sorry, the dispute resolution service providers, I see no
change there from -- no change from the version -- the DAG V2 on the -
- who those service providers would be.  The text is still they've
agreed in principle.  Do you expect those service providers to
actually change, or are you fairly confident now that the people
listed will be the service providers?  And I have another question
after that.

>>KURT PRITZ:  I'm fairly confident that those will be the service
providers.  We have letters of engagement with them.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Okay.  And just another short question on
the quick-look procedure for the morality and public order objection.
Can you just explain briefly if that would be a set procedure, the
quick-look thing, how does it work?  Does the evaluator get some sort
of guideline to do that quick look, or is it just totally up to him?

>>KURT PRITZ:  I think -- isn't there a procedure?  I don't know. 
Let me consult with Dan for a second.

So I'm going to have to -- it makes a reference to it.  I don't know
if the procedure is published or not.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Mike.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Just a very brief question, clarification
really, I think.  In 3.1.2, I think I saw also in 2.3.1, you say,
"String confusion objection ground, who may object?"  Existing TLD
operator or gTLD applicant in current round.  It's almost certain to
be the case in future rounds that there will be still pending
applications that are neither existing TLDs or pending in the then-
current round.  I assume those that those would still be the basis
for objection, right?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah, so we will check to make sure the language
covers that.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Is that all you had, Mike?

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Yes.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thank you.  Antony.

>> ANTONY VAN COUVERING:  With regard to the independent objectors,
I heard a lot of language about conflict of interest before.  Is
there any conflict of interest policy with regard to the independent
objector?  And if not, why not?

>>KURT PRITZ:  There certainly has to be, and I don't know if it's
the same conflict of interest criteria that are written for the
evaluators or would need to be changed or heightened.  And so the
definition of that role, while it's been elaborated on in this
guidebook, you know, we're not to the point where we could start to
look for candidates for independent evaluator.

And before we do that, the sort of thing you are talking about would
have to be fleshed out.  I think it's -- we'll either have to say it
is the same or it is separate and define what it is.

>> ANTONY VAN COUVERING:  Thank you.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Werner?

>>WERNER STAUB:  Yes, Werner Staub.  I'm making the comment about
the complete defense item which I already sent comments to the public
forum before.  It seems to me that it is still a dangerous thing to
say that somebody will enjoy complete defense simply because one has
standing to object.

There could be cases that communities have more than one established
institution.  That happens very often, that there is no central,
worldwide, absolute established institution but there are many
regional or by other differences separate established institution.  

Take dot bank for instance.  It could be a bank association in a
certain country that could certainly be an established institution. 
And one of them could go and actually enjoy complete defense simply
because they are one.

And there could, however, be a majority of the members of those
communities who would be objecting against that specific proposal. 
And their objection would, thus, be defeated.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So I think you're right.  And I think, but I'm not
sure, but I think that the defense is that you don't have to
represent or be a member of the community that the objector belongs
to but you can be -- use that standing requirement as a complete
defense as it pertains to the community to which you belong or
represent.

>>WERNER STAUB:  I'm sorry.  I didn't understand.

>>KURT PRITZ:  I don't understand it either.

[Laughter]

>>WERNER STAUB:  If the Swiss Bank Association said, We want to
create dot bank and the other bank association in other countries are
against it, would they be able to object or not?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Well, yes, they would be able to object because they
satisfy the standing requirements to object.  But the Swiss bank may
be able to assert a defense by demonstrating it's a bona fide
representative of the community which it purports to represent, which
is different than the objector's community.

>>WERNER STAUB:  So the Swiss Bank Association could then say, Look,
your objection is going to lead nowhere because we applied, you
didn't, that's why we get it.

>>KURT PRITZ:  That could be the outcome.

>>WERNER STAUB:  I'm sorry?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah, I don't think they would respond in quite that
language.

>>WERNER STAUB:  I think that would be dangerous to have.  What you
just said also has an additional danger, I believe.  A
"representative" is a non-clear word.  And I think it should be
clarified that it is to mean that it is an organization that has
authority to speak and act on behalf of the community and not just to
be a member of the community because if they are a member, any bank
could go and say, We want dot bank.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So you are exactly right.  And I'm speaking in
shorthand up here, and what's in the guidebook is meant to provide a
lot more clarity about it.

But if you think that still -- You know, it's a very hard concept to
write down.  And if you think still that additional clarity needs to
be provided and, even better, if you have suggestions for it, that
would be great because, you know, a lot of people stare at those
words and try to make them better and it is hard to make them better.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So I think, Werner, it goes to the reason why there
is this community objection which I think the original point of the
council was for communities to kick out sort of -- people who are
trying to appropriate the string who don't belong to that community. 
And the community should be able to say, You don't represent us. You
are the wrong applicant for that string.

What we had to wrestle with is what happens if there is competing
ones, if you have French bankers and the Swiss bankers.  I don't
think the original point of the objection process was to get rid of
one or the other.  I think we have a contention resolution process
where we try to pick among competing community applicants.

We didn't intend the community objection process to kick out
applicants if they do legitimately represent a community, even though
it might not be the same one as the objector.  

So I think you are reading it right and it is still tough.  So we
invite you just to submit comments on it.

But I hope that's a little bit clearer.  I wanted to ask Kurt to
give his -- just after listening to Kurt's last answer, to give his
standard disclaimer he has given at a few of these meetings about
don't listen to what Kurt's saying here.  We're doing our best to
answer the questions, but please rely on what's in the guidebook.  

I don't want somebody to come back two years later and say, "Even
though the guidebook says this, Kurt said at this meeting in Seoul at
11:00 a.m. on some Saturday that this is the rule."  In fact, all
applicants will have to rely on what's in the guidebook and what's
there now is draft and subject to change.

So please rely on the written worth that's authoritative and
official.  We are trying to be helpful and answer questions and
clarify things, but that's not the final binding text.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  This will be the last person on Mod 3.  Edmon.

>>EDMON CHUNG:  I think I raised this in Mexico as well.  I'm not
sure whether it fits into Module 3 or Module 1.  But this issue about
a confusingly similar string, a gTLD string, there is an
understanding that you cannot apply for a confusingly similar string.  

However, as an existing registry, when I apply for a confusingly
similar string to my own TLD, there's no explicit writing in the
applicant guidebook for that.

For example, dot Asia, I would say dot Asia (different
pronunciation) in Korean, for example, we would consider that
confusingly similar but we would like to apply for it.  Right now it
doesn't have specific verbiage about that.  It was talked about being
an oversight which maybe should be added back into it.  But I haven't
seen that being added back.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So I think on that example, it wouldn't be visually
similar, so it would not be kicked out in the sort of staff quick
look, because "Asia" in Korean and "Asia" in English don't look
anything alike, so it would go into the objection process, and if I'm
correct, only the existing operator can object, so as long as you
don't object to your own application, I think you --

>>EDMON CHUNG:  I'll give another example.  For example, you know,
let's say asie -- a-s-i-e -- is Asia, and how would I apply for that?

>>DAN HALLORAN:  Right.  So that, I don't know if we've picked up,
because there is -- and I don't even know if the -- if you go back
and look at the GNSO policy recommendation -- is that where we got
this idea in the first place?  There shouldn't be visually confusing
strings.  I don't know if there was an exception back then and I
don't know if we've built one yet for, there should be visually --
you know, should there be -- should it be okay to have visually
confusing strings in the root as long as they're run by the same guy?
Does that -- is that going to confuse consumers anyway or is that
okay or...

So I don't know.  I think there's bigger questions.  I don't know if
it's just a simple, like, oversight.  I think it's something we have
to wrestle with.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  It does seem like there's something that should be
looked at here.  I also, Edmon, was surprised when I saw that that
still wasn't dealt with.  

Maybe, Dan, to deal with the concern you just expressed, maybe there
needs to be some broader possibilities for an exception to be
evaluated there, because I think that may be a very common problem in
IDN applications in particular.  Philip?

>>PHILIP SHEPPARD:  Just as a follow-up on that, I mean I think we
need to think outside of the sole interest of an applicant here.  The
point about the visually confusing test is all about users.  Yeah?  

Now, the fact that might suit an applicant because they happen to
like a translation as being confusing is all very well for the
applicant, but it doesn't meet the public interest test.  So let's be
clear, again, about some of the priorities of our tests and the
reason some of those guidelines are in there, so we're very well to
hear -- 

I mean, what I find slightly frustrating about the conversation in
this group sometimes is we get very specific examples about very
specific people with very specific problems, but we're looking at a
general global public interest objective primarily.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Mod 4 now.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So we have Module 4, Module 5 changes, and also
registry agreement changes.

So I'll just fly through those and I think that's the end.

So in the community priority, which is also comparative evaluation,
the annotations have been added to the criteria to try to aid
applicants to provide clarity about how the scoring is going to occur.

So again, there's a continual honing of this area based on
discussions and testing.

There's an option to postpone the auction if one of the parties is a
community-based applicant and the parties agree to postpone the
auction so that they can settle the dispute.

Pre-delegation tests have been honed quite a bit so it's really
specific now and I think ready for prime time, but I'm interested to
see what everybody here thinks.

And then in response to public comment, there's a new section
outlining the general obligations of a registry operator in summary
form, kind of going to what Philip said, focusing on the user and the
registrant.

And then in the agreement, which is attached to Module 5, we've
included their requirement for the continuity instrument.

So specifically, you know, I think there's two choices for how that
can be -- that obligation can be met and that's in there.  We've
updated the data escrow specification and Dan can tell us what the
heck we did there.

And the -- wow.  I should just turn this over to Dan.

In registry/registrar separation, we've taken out a very specific
proposal in response to public comment and provided a range of
options intended to capture the -- intended to capture, you know, a
range of different proposals that have been made, indicating, again,
that this question is open and a more defined or specific proposal
needs to be put into the guidebook.

Price controls.  The six-month period for noticing price controls
were -- was reduced for new registrations only, recognizing that
business models might need to make changes more quickly than in six
months, but still requiring the renewal -- their renewals, the notice
period for renewals, and also adding a requirement that there be a
uniform price for renewals across the board in order to provide some
further protection for registrants.

And that we've specified a post-delegation dispute process for
community-based TLDs, so it was intended all along that a community-
based top-level domain had to live up to its obligations and the
restrictions that were included in the agreement as a result of it
becoming a community-based TLD.

This is how that restriction is enforced, and we've modified the
renewal provisions somewhat in the agreement.

So those are the -- oh, wait.  Is there more?  There's more.  Hang
onto your hats, everybody.

So there's more agreement changes.  I'll just touch on some of them.
We've tried to provide some clarity around the purpose and timing of
the payment of a variable fee and added a fee adjustment for inflation.

The process for amending the registry agreement has been changed,
and now amendments can only be made to certain sections of the
agreement, and the requirement for -- for a thick WHOIS goes back to
a change made on the second version of the guidebook.

The specific mechanism for reserving certain -- for reserving
specific country names at the second level and the reference to an
info-like procedure for releasing them is in the agreement.  There's
a discussion that still has to be had about whether centralized zone
file access service would serve to help the issue of potential for
malicious conduct as has been suggested.

And there's a trademark post-delegation dispute resolution
procedure.  We talked about that some in a meeting yesterday.

And so that is intended to preserve trademark rights after
delegation, as opposed to before.

So three -- three slides with tons of changes to get through to the
end.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  I have three people in the queue right now. 
Let me know if you -- hands are going up.  Okay.

All right.  Adrian.  You're first.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Thanks, Chuck.  Just in respect to objections,
it says here that previous objections to the application -- this is
in 4.2.3 -- let me go back to where it is.  4.2.3, the very last --
just before 4.3, where it says "Auction."  The last paragraph.  It
says, "Previous objections to the application during the same
application round will be taken into account when scoring."

I assume you mean by objections that they -- well, how do you define
objection?  How far did that get?  How far did that objection get
through the process before you --

>>KURT PRITZ:  I think that means that if there was a previous
objection and there was opposition -- you know, there was opposition
voiced, that that would count for other objections too.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Right.  But when is an objection an objection? 
I'm sorry, if it's just a frivolous one that goes -- that doesn't
count as an objection, so it would be one that you would have had to
won in an objection evaluation?

>>KURT PRITZ:  No, I don't think so.  I think an objection is made
by someone with standing who's paid a fee.


>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Right.

>>KURT PRITZ:  So once you've crossed that rubicon, then --

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Perfect.  That clears that up.  Thank you. 
Yeah, I think it -- it could probably do worth having that maybe
elaborated upon in the -- just to define what -- 4.2 but it's just
before the 4.3.  It's the last paragraph in 4.2.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Ray?

>>RAY FASSETT:  Thanks.  Ray Fassett.  I have a -- 

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So I just want to -- I'm not sure that that is
intended to mean formal objections filed through the objection
process.  It could mean -- so it needs to be clarified -- I agree it
needs to be clarified but that could mean, you know, a letter from
the relevant community writing in to somebody saying that we object
to this even though they don't file.  I'm not sure.  Whatever it is,
it should be clarified.  I agree with you.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Given that there's not a lot of points on offer
here, you know, I would like to see that clarified because otherwise,
you know, one objection or, you know -- could be detrimental to a
community.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Ray?

>>RAY FASSETT:  Great.  Thanks, Chuck.  Ray Fassett.  So I'm having
difficulty on a concept that has to do with the community criteria. 
You know, there's 16 points possible, you need to get 14 and I
suppose if you look at it this way, you take the 185,000 and divide
it by 14, each point's worth, what, 12,000 or $15,000, so these
points are very valuable, right?

So I'm trying to get my hands around the idea that the comparative
evaluation is to resolve string contention, which inherently means
more than one.

But then there's this point inside the criteria that has to do with
uniqueness, which means "one."

So I don't -- why -- I mean, as you sat through and came up with
this one point for uniqueness, why did you reason that an applicant
that could qualify for uniqueness would even file as a community app
because they don't need to worry about contention.

So there's a precious point out of those 16 to me that appears
frivolous and probably will never be used.so I'm just trying to
reconcile that:

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yes.  I'm not so sure.  So pretend that Microsoft
isn't a trademark but it's a very unique name.  That anybody could
apply for "Microsoft" even though -- you know, just like they could
any string -- any string of letters so I'm trying to think of
something that's a unique name like "Navajo" is very unique, right? 
But others could apply for Navajo.  So I must be missing your point. 
Right?  The point is that "Navajo" has a nexus, that label has a
nexus, a high nexus or a close nexus with that community.

>>RAY FASSETT:  Yeah.

>>KURT PRITZ:  And so to reward the fact that there's closeness and
also reward the fact that it's really not used anywhere else and so
that is that community's label and nobody else's, so it gets -- it
gets the extra point.

>>RAY FASSETT:  That -- okay.  That's not -- okay.  Then that's not
what I understand the criteria of uniqueness to mean.  I thought the
criteria of uniqueness meant there is no other meaning whatsoever to
that word.

In order to score that one point, it cannot have another meaning.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Right.

>>RAY FASSETT:  Well, then "Navajo" would not qualify.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Why not?

>>RAY FASSETT:  Because it has other meanings.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  Right.  So you only get the point if it is unique. 
That's intentional.

>>RAY FASSETT:  Right.  Yeah, I understand, but if it's so unique,
why would the applicant file as a community app?  There would be no
reason to because there would be no contention.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So, yeah, anyway could apply for any string and
anyone can apply and say they're a community, so we have to apply
these points to weed out the ones who aren't really what they say
they are.  I mean, that's -- this is the hardest part of the whole --
or in my book, one of the hardest parts of the whole process but, you
know, we want to avoid awarding strings to people who don't really
deserve them as a community, we don't want to not give strings to
legitimate communities, so it's a tough balancing, so we'll take your
comment but, I mean, that one I think is intentional.  We want to
reward people who have unique strings, where they have a string that
uniquely refers to their community.

>>RAY FASSETT:  My recommendation is to wrap up would be to take
that one point and put it into the other section which is, you know,
one would be worth 4, 3, 2 -- instead of 3 and 2 on the matches and
identifying, take that point up there and make it 4, 3.  It's right
now -- to me, it's just too difficult to get the 14 out of 16.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Bret?

>>BRET FAUSETT:  Yeah.  I appreciate all the changes that went into
the community priority standard in the latest version of the
guidebook.  You can still go out in the hallway and have vigorous
debates with people about what constitutes community priority,
though.  And the fact that you're able to have those debates suggests
to me that we're not yet there, as to what -- the degree of clarity. 
And especially mindful of something Dan mentioned earlier that
doesn't matter what ICANN staff thinks, ultimately all this is going
to be implemented by people who probably aren't in this room and
haven't followed it to the degree that we all have.

So I would love to see some examples in the -- the final book that
says, you know -- walks it through, you know, "Here are some examples
of communities, these meet the criteria, these don't."  Something so
that this debate over what's community is just dead by the time it
goes to the evaluators.  I mean there should be no room for guesswork
on what constitutes "community" and I don't particularly care what
the standards are.  Just that they are bright-line clear.  And I'd be
happy to, you know, help draft some examples and you can run it
through the mill and you can tell me what the answer is, but, you
know, I'd love to see that kind of thing.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah.  I don't want you to draft examples.  I want
you to help -- help us with the clarity.  It's -- as Dan said, it's
very difficult, and so -- but -- and so I want to work with you and
others to try to improve it.  Because we have that same goal.  I
mean...

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  (Speaker is off microphone) is that an internal
rule that ICANN does not want to use examples within the draft
application guidebook?  Is.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Well, it's not a rule.  It's fraught with peril.

So I think that examples can be used in cases where there might
already be a TLD or, you know, something that's already resolved, so...

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Going on to Stéphane.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  Thanks, Chuck.  We're talking about Module 4
and Module 5, right?  So Module 5 addresses -- links to the base
agreement.  I just wanted to ask you a question about the changes to
the -- and I'm reading from the summary changes to the base agreement
document, just --

So before, we had this clause that up to 100,000 names, you could --
you could use the same registry and registrar, and over that, you
couldn't, and now you've changed that and you've included four
possibles and you're explaining that due to the controversy between --
you know, with the registry/registrar separation thing, that's what
you've done.

Just I wanted to ask about where you expect corporate applicants to
go in there.

If -- I mean, I remember you talking about this at a previous
meeting, but I'm not -- still not exactly sure what ICANN's position
is on this.

Do you expect them to -- I mean, is it -- are you just looking at
this and saying, "This is a registry/registrar separation issue and
we don't care what type of applicant goes into this.  Everyone has to
go into the same thing"?  Or are you trying to accommodate certain
types of applicants and say, "Those corporates that would logically,
I suppose, want to run their own -- I mean, if they just want five
names in their registry, then they don't want to farm those names out
to the full registrar base"?  How are you -- you know, are you
looking at that yet or are you just waiting on the community to
determine that?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Well, right now what's in the guidebook is there's
two kinds of TLDs.  There's a community-based TLD and a standard TLD,
so there's not a brand TLD.

There's also a requirement, in accordance with the consensus policy
that -- or the policy recommendation that registries use ICANN-
accredited registrars, so that is what's in the guidebook too.

There's not a -- there hasn't been a policy about different
categories of TLDs, although we encourage, you know, categorization
of -- self-categorization of TLDs as a way to differentiate TLDs to
differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

And frankly, there is difficulty in creating categories of TLDs, so
if there's a brand TLD, for example, what are the rules around that,
and do those rules entitle an exemption from the requirement for use
of ICANN-accredited registrars?

So does a brand TLD just include its employees or its employees and
agents or employees, agents, and vendors?  What is the bright line
and then what are the compliance -- you know, contractual compliance
implications for monitoring that behavior so that registrars can be
assured that, you know, a brand TLD that has this exemption is
complying with whatever the restrictions are.  So there's -- there's
the creation of a brand TLD or other categories of TLDs that lead to
exemptions from the policy recommendations are somewhat problematic,
because they create a host of compliance issues and gray-line issues.

>>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER:  I understand the problems that it creates
and the situation, but I guess my question is:  Will you be looking
to actually take into account those specifics?  I mean, if you --
this is -- this will be a problem, and it's a problem both ways.  I
mean, it's a problem for corporate applicants.  They have to
consider, you know, can they keep control of their application.  And
it's a problem for the community because there's a -- you know, an
expectation that you have to use the ICANN-accredited registrars.

So are we sticking to our guns here and we're saying, "This is the
rules and, you know, just fit in there," knowing that some people
won't be able to or do you think there's still room -- I guess that's
my question -- for negotiation?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Well, certainly there's -- you know, this is all a
proposal that's posted for public comment, and so comments are
welcome, and to the extent that you or somebody listening has a
recommendation for a categorization of TLD that results in an
exemption from a policy recommendation that -- that proposal be
accompanied by some implementation advice how it can be done
effectively and cleanly and not, you know, multiply the ICANN
compliance staff by 10, you know, for essentially non-valuated
services.

I want to finish with -- you know, I want to repeat something Philip
said because I wish I said it first.

But really, the new TLD program is all about benefit to users and
registrants, and so, you know, the program is really focused on that.
And at least initially right now, you know, there's nothing stopping
brand holders or corporations from acquiring TLDs and using them the
way they see fit.  There is an issue with -- you know, that it might
cost more money, absent some relief from the policy recommendations
that were made, and so that's a -- that's another one of the
balancings that need to be done.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  We're at a point where we're past -- we're over time
and there is another meeting that's scheduled to start five minutes
ago.  Are you okay for another five minutes, Kurt?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yes.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  What I'm going to do, though, we have eight
more people in queue, and what I'm going to do is change the order a
little bit so that those who have not had an opportunity to ask a
question, I'll deal -- we'll go as far as we can and deal with those
who have not had an opportunity to answer a question first and I'll
start with Ron.

>>RON ANDRUFF:  Thank you, Chuck.  Ron Andruff.  I'm looking at the
numbering and the valuation criteria and in speaking with staff --
right here, Kurt.

Speaking with staff, I had understood that zero actually had a point
value, so zero to 4 would be zero, 1, 2, 3, 4, and in that case, you
would end up with 16 of 20, which would remove a lot of the
subjectivity and a lot of the concerns that a lot of the community has.

14 of 16, recognizing that these are very subjective questions and a
human being is going to make that determination, is a parameter
that's very tight and as has been noted in other public comments, all
during this process, it appears that ICANN's trying to drive
everything to auction.

So when I look, for example, at the -- at the various numbers here,
you'll see zero actually has a value.  Zero for insufficient proof of
support is one.  Zero, strong and relevant opposition.  So that
actually has a value, and staff had explained that to me that zero
really was a point value even though it's zero to 4.  So I think it's
really important that we make this distinction and try to make sure
that we remove the subjectivity to allow those that are community-
based applicants to have a fair shot at it, as opposed to it being so
narrow that every community-based applicant may well miss, on one or
another point, and find themselves in an auction when, in fact, there
is a strong community behind it.

Can you please clarify that?

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yes.  Well, I think zero means zero, but I think if
you would --

[Laughter]

>>KURT PRITZ:  You know --

>>RON ANDRUFF:  That's not how staff explained it to me.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah.  It was Bret.  Bret was talking about examples
before, but if you could provide examples and scenarios where you
think a bona fide community applicant would not -- would not get the
priority that it requests because of this scoring, you could write
that out in a comment and sort of make a case for that this criteria
is too tight because these applications that I think everybody agrees
should qualify as a community priority doesn't -- doesn't win.

So you could help clarify the model.  So a second -- you know,
ICANN's not trying to drive everybody to auction.  In fact, we think
auctions won't occur.  We think parties in contention, if it's not
settled through this community priority, will be driven to settle
because that is, by far, a more economical way to settle the
contention than going to auction.

And -- and as different from like public utility auctions or
bandwidth auctions, ICANN encourages the parties to meet and confer
and try to settle the dispute before it gets to auction.

So I just -- I don't want to take that out of it but Dan's going to
qualify what I'm saying.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  I just want to add onto that and qualify and repeat
that, I mean, again, don't rely on what a staff member told you here
or in the hallway.  Only rely on what's in the final applicant
guidebook and even don't rely on what's in this draft guidebook
because it's subject to change and just -- if it says zero points
that's zero points, that's not 1.00, and so we can try and clarify
that if there's some confusion about zero means or to clarify that
it's not -- you don't get one point for having a zero or whatever. 
But don't rely on -- the bottom line is don't rely on what a staff
member told you in the hall.

>>RON ANDRUFF:  Understood.  I'm just saying in the constant
dialogue that we've had over the last couple of years -- but I think
it's really important and I think the community supports this very
strongly -- let's open that up so that it's not such a tight
parameter because again, it's a human failing and even the documents
that we sent out to invite the evaluators to evaluate, it says in
there this is highly subjective.  We're trying to get rid of
subjectivity here.  As Bret well said, whatever it takes, let's take
subjectivity is out of this thing and it's absolutely criteria based
and let's review that again and make sure the numbers are right.  12
of 16 I think is fair.  It's 75%.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  To get a few more in, we're going to have
very quick, so Zahid.

>>ZAHID JAMIL:  Thank you.  5.4.1, and it's on the subsequent page
from where it starts, you've recommended implement rights protection
mechanisms and in reading from it, it says, "The registry operator is
required to comply with and implement a trademark post-delegation
dispute resolution policy."  

Now, when I try to search for that, here's what happens and this is
a comment.  If you go to the Web site and you go into new gTLDs, you
end up going to the applicant guidebook, you don't find any reference
to right protection mechanisms with -- in connection to the DAG.  

I would recommend if you could -- you could give sort of a link to
that, so people don't know that that probably forms part of it.

But if you go into proposal -- or public comments, you find a
mention of proposed rights protection mechanisms.  You click on that,
you end up getting only two, the URS and the IP clearinghouse.  The
post-delegation doesn't appear in that.  So one comment, could we
have that there so the people can, you know, look at it and probably
comment on that?  I mean, I'm just presuming if it not up for public
comment?  So that's one.

Second, from seeing the comparison of the post-delegation mechanism
to the IRT one, it seems that the -- a breach of the registry
agreement has been excluded as a grounds for a party -- maybe a
trademark holder or somebody else -- to basically launch an
application.

So -- and also I think it's important to highlight the words
"affirmative conduct" has been placed in as the grounds for starting
a post-delegation infringement.  Now, if that's the case, what
happens say for a community or a trademark owner who didn't object
earlier and then finds subsequently -- because there were
representations in the application and they're in the registry
agreement -- what happens if subsequently the nature of use of that
gTLD changes?  I'm not talking about a trademark infringement per se.
I'm talking about nature of use.  The way it's been used.  Now, he
cannot -- or that community cannot object because that's not a
straightforward trademark infringement, but it's a breach of the
contract.

So what post-delegation mechanism is available for that?

>>DAN HALLORAN:  Do you want to talk about that?

>>KURT PRITZ:  So I think that's a breach of the registry agreement
and that ICANN's contractual compliance department is -- is tasked
with following up on complaints or auditing to ensure that the
agreement is -- that the operator is in compliance with the
agreement, and so it's not a complaint to an independent dispute
resolution provider -- right? -- it's a complaint to ICANN, who is
obligated to pursue that violation of the agreement and enforce the
agreement.

>>ZAHID JAMIL:  Can I suggest some communities might see that as
something they won't be able to do, so a proposal is to put that into
the rights protection mechanisms, saying that if, supposing, there is
a breach of the agreement, possibly those communities should also be
able to take -- make use of that post-delegation.  Just a comment.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So one thing we did try to change is if there's a
breach of the agreement, that's a matter between ICANN and the
registry operator.  It's a bilateral contract.  There are no third-
party beneficiaries and they want that to come to our compliance
department and we want to take action on that as a contract
violation.  We've gotten feedback there maybe needs to be ways with
to track that or to have SLAs or to make sure we get back to the
person who complains about that, so there's -- they have some way to
make sure they get some response.  But we tried to clarify that, and
make it so that disputes, you know, directly between a trademark
holder and a registry operator are handled through this dispute
resolution processed.  Disputes about the registry agreement,
breaches of the registry agreement, are handled between ICANN and the
registry operator as a compliance matter.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  What I'm going to do for the remainder of the
queue is allow you a minute to make your point or ask your question. 
It will be in the transcription, and unless it's -- you guys deem it
to be urgent to respond, I will -- we can defer the response either
via e-mail, the council list or whatever.  Is that all right?  We --
we have to get to another agenda.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  Yeah.  I mean I actually strongly prefer on all
these things --

>>CHUCK GOMES:  I'm sorry.  You prefer what?

>>DAN HALLORAN:  On all these things -- I mean, I think this is
fine.  And Kurt does this especially happily but it's more helpful
for staff to get the written comment that we can go back and look at
the written comments and then we can go back and look at the
guidebook and provide a summary of the comments and the analysis -- 

>>CHUCK GOMES: And I'll repeat what I said earlier.  Everyone who
has asked a question or who has not for that matter and made a
comment, make sure you put those into the public comment forum, okay?

Let's go to Jeff, and keep it to a minute, please.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  This is Jeff Neuman.  I'm not going to ask
about what you think I would ask about because those are subject of
other discussions and this meeting is really a council meeting, so
we're supposed to all be asking questions related to the council
policies as opposed to individual.  

One of the council policies that was passed was to ensure that
there's predictability and reliability, and I want to thank you,
first, for adding all the information on the technical requirements. 
That is a vast improvement and I think that's really going to help
users in the end.

The one issue I have is almost every section is followed by the
words "which ICANN may amend from time to time as its own reasonable
discretion."  I think that goes against the whole council
recommendation about predictability.  I understand why things may
need to change, but the comment I have is that you really need to
nail down the requirements and since we are bilateral parties. 
You're not a regulator.  You're not a government, you.  Got to have
certainty in those contracts between private entities.  So, thank you
for adding those technical requirements, and I would just make the
comment to take out that discretion.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thank you, Jeff.  Alan?

>>ALAN GREENBERG:  Kurt's last answer to Stéphane covered it, so no.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thank you.  Okay.  Kristina.

>>KRISTINA ROSETTE:  Yeah.  Section 4.5 of the registry agreement
relating to transition of registry upon termination of agreement.  I
think the new language is a significant improvement over what was
there, but I've kind of mapped out the scenarios and frankly I can't
come up with a scenario in which ICANN would really want to
transition operation of a dot brand registry to another operator. 
Because no matter how I play it, either you're going to find somebody
who's going to be willing to do it only subject to significant
indemnification that ICANN isn't going to want to do, or -- I mean,
either way, it's just a scenario that I can't see that ICANN
realistically is going to want to find itself in, and I think, you
know, if I'm thinking this through correctly, if there is no real
scenario in which a dot brand that is operated consistent -- you
know, by the brand owner for the purpose of forwarding the -- you
know, developing the brand, et cetera, I think it probably makes
sense to go ahead and just say that.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thank you, Kristina.

>>KURT PRITZ:  Yeah.  I think there's more than dot brand where
that's -- you know, we've been in discussions with the UPU right now
so, that's another example where that's problematic.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  Werner.

>>WERNER STAUB:  Okay.  I'll make a very short comment about the
auctions.  

I was reluctant to make comments about that, because, you know, I
don't think it should go to auction so quickly.  But now that we're
getting closer to the possibility of auctions happening, I think we
should make sure that we get the right design, and the design that we
currently have for an auction is a revenue maximization auction, and
it should not be.  It should be an auction that is strictly for
contention resolution, and that means it shouldn't happen so quickly.

The auction should not be, you know, a round announced in 45
minutes, and here you go, and you have specialists who have skills
that probably very few people have, in terms of finance, who can
arrange the right kind of financing and so on.

It should be an auction where people can go back to their
communities or to their supporters or whatever, negotiate between the
contenders, to avoid having to go into the next round, so rather than
having 45 minutes to the next round, it should be at least a week.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thank you, Werner.  Antony?

>>ANTONY VAN COUVERING:  Yes.  I'm -- thank you, Chuck.  I'm hoping
I'm misreading this, but in the post-delegation dispute resolution
provisions, it appears that upon complaint, it might go to a single
panelist who might shut down a registry, and ICANN has nothing to do
with it, and -- although there's an appeal.  Obviously there's a big
business disruption.

Am I misreading that?  And if not, why is that there?

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So I think it's a thing that definitely needs
clarification, and, you know, the idea is if somebody -- if a
panelist issues a finding that's not going to like automatically self-
execute itself.  It's going to come back -- you know, ICANN
ultimately is going to have -- be in the driver's seat and we have a
contract with the registry operator still so we have to clarify what
is going to happen and under what circumstances would a -- would
ICANN not exactly follow that remedy or would it modify it or work
out a settlement or -- so we need to work on that some more, I think.

>>ANTONY VAN COUVERING:  I'm just -- again, let me just reiterate: 
I'm concerned that even a three-person panel is a problem, but a
single person shutting down an entire business with potential
disruption not only to the registry but to the registrants seem to me
extremely problematic.  Thank you.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  Thanks.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Thank you.  Mike. and this is the last
comment/question.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Oh, cool.  I think it's a doozy.  So I -- if I'm
a registry operator, how do I keep my -- how do I keep valuable
domain names, all of them, from getting sucked up by cybersquatters
or domainers -- either one -- in the first five minutes of land rush?  

>>ANDREI KOLESNIKOV: Five seconds.  

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH: Five seconds.  Better.  Thanks, Andrei.  

I mean, why can't a registry operator register as many of its own
domains on its own behalf and develop them however them, since
obviously that is going to be to a better benefit of the community
and that TLD -- of the users in that TLD, because the registry
operator has a vested interest in developing those sites and the real
interesting, unique content, rather than pay per click landing pages?

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So I don't -- I'm not sure what you're seeing in
the contract right now you think that would -- would prevent that.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  It's in 2.6, I think.  Well, it's the
conjunction of the requirement that you use -- ICANN-accredited
registrars and you give them equal access to the names and it says
that if -- yeah, it says if you want to register names on your own
behalf, you have to use accredited registrars.  Well, if I do that
and I give them equal access, well then their cybersquatter/domainer
customers are going to get the good names before I can even do it.

>>DAN HALLORAN:  So I think -- I mean, it requires more looking at. 
And thanks for raising that.  It's a tricky subject to get your hands
on and right now we have just kind of a patchwork of rules and it's
kind of murky how it might apply.  But there's other things to take
into account.  You know, there's a provision for registry operators
to make reserve lists.  There's nothing in there right now about
prices.  Right now some registry operators hold names back, some
names as premium names, and they allocate them differently, so
there's no -- not that I'm seeing, and I want to, you know, talk more
about it, but there's nothing in black and white that says you have
to absolutely dump every single name out all at once at the same
price.  That's not in there.

>>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  No.  But it says if you want to register them --
if you want to use them on our own account, then you have to use
ICANN-accredited registrars and you have to give them equal access. 
So that means by definition, there's no way you're going to be able
to do that, so we have to fix that.  It's critical.

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Okay.  I'm going to have to wrap it up here because
we have some planning to do in a lunch meeting that follows for the
GNSO Council.  And I thank Kurt and Dan and everyone else who
contributed to -- contributed to this session.

[Break]

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  While Marika is getting set up here, again, this is
the policy development process work team of the PPSC.  This is our
face-to-face meeting in Seoul, for the transcription.  Obviously, we
all know we're here.  

Right now the agenda for today is to, basically, go over -- we are
on -- I'm going to start with a couple slides to talk about where we
are in the process.  And then we're just going to get right back into
where we left off on some of the calls, which is really stage three. 
And I'll talk about what that is for those of you that are new to
this.  

And right now at this meeting what we decided to do was to go
through the survey of questions that relate to the topics that we've
been discussing.  And we'll go through that.  

The second agenda item is to talk about a face-to-face meeting that
we brought up earlier just to make some more progress.  And then --
sorry.    I think I'm going to -- those are the two agenda items.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS: We might talk about the questions for stage --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN: Right.  If we have time we might go through some of
the questions for stage 4.  The survey is quite extensive.  Yes, James?

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  Sorry, Jeff.  James Bladel.  And I may be
misremembering this.  But weren't there three or four overarching
issues that we wanted to touch on at this particular meeting that we
set aside not at our last call but two calls ago for this?  And, just
logistics and time, we're just not going to be able to tackle those
today?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I think it is logistics and time.

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  That's cool.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Let's go through some of the slides as to where we
are.  I'll do that.  These are slides, by the way, that I gave at the
GNSO council meeting.  It talks a little bit more, but these slides
are good to talk about where we are.  Just as a reminder of where we
are in the process, there are five stages that we were talking about.
And then an overarching issues that kind of apply through each of
these stages. The first stage being the planning and initiation of
the issues report.  The second one being the GNSO Council Proposal
Review and Initiation of a PDP.  The third, which we're going to
spend the bulk of time talking about the survey on is the PDP working
group policies, procedures, and support.  

The fourth one, which we -- if we have a little bit of time, that's
what we're really going to pick up with on the next couple of
meetings.  And then the 5th, which is voting and implementation.  And
then the 5th one is the assessment of policy effectiveness and
compliance.  

If you want to just jump to the chart.  Yeah.  So this talks about
where we are in each of those stages.  With the first stage we've
done a breakdown.  We've had discussions within the working group. 
We took an online survey.  We discussed those, and then have a draft
report that everyone has seen.  We haven't received too many comments
on it.  We haven't closed the comment period on it.  But,
essentially, that's out there.  That's on the TWiki that was sent
around on the list.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  On the Wiki.  

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Sorry.  Someone used TWiki earlier.  J. Scott.  The
Wiki.  

The second stage we've done a breakdown.  There's been discussion on
the working group.  We've done the online survey.  We've talked about
it.  And there will be a draft report. I'd hoped to have it up by
today's meeting.  But, through travel and some other things that have
come up, the plan is to get that draft report out within the next
couple days or week so that we can begin getting comments on that.  

The third stage, which we're talking about today, the survey part,
is to -- it says 11/2009.  I think that's really meant to cover --
give us a little bit of breathing room as far as what we can finish
discussing all the survey items with a draft report in December of
2009.  

And then, you know, at the next few conference calls talking about
stage 4 and having a discussion on that and doing a survey within the
next month or two.  

One of the things I do want to talk about is, as far as how we're
progressing, there have been a couple things that have been injected
into the council process in the last few weeks,  one being a board
letter that is requiring a bunch of work within a short period of
time.  So I'll throw out a question later on as we're thinking about
this as to whether we need to build in a little bit more time for us.
We had talked initially about a face-to-face meeting possibly by the
end of this year.  I think, given all the work that's going on on the
council level, I think January is probably much more realistic.

So that's where we are right now.  Is there any questions about
where we are, where we're heading?  

Again, just to summarize, the goal at the end of this is we'll have
five different draft reports.  We will combine those into one, once
we're satisfied with them.  We'll send out the -- we'll go through
all five reports because -- the reason we're doing it this way and
not just releasing everything out for public comment right away as we
finish one stage is that we're finding each stage has something that
relates to other things in other stages.  And, until you can look at
the entire process from beginning to end, it's hard to actually
finalize any of the stages.  

So the goal is, then, to finalize all five stages into one document,
put that out for public comment, take in the comments, revise the
report, and then send it up to the full PPSC, the steering committee.
Any questions on that?  Nope?  Okay.  If you want to just -- in the
overarching issues, was that the slide?  Yeah.

Again, throughout all of these stages, these are three issues that
we really need to keep an eye on and keep in the back of our minds,
because it runs through all the stages, is different timing aspects
of when things fall into place, thinking about the issue of foreign
translations.  It comes up all the time, as far as, you know, if
you're going to have a public comment period, what do you put out for
translation?  We're going to talk a little bit about that.  There's
some questions on that in stage 3.  I'll save that for the survey. 
And then, of course, keeping consistent definitions.  When is
something called a PDP versus raising an issues report, things like
that.  Those are the three things to keep in the back of your mind,
which I ask anyone to remind -- if I misuse terms or anybody else,
please keep us all honest here.

So, that said, I think we can just jump to the survey questions.

We're going to do it a little bit differently this time than we've
done it for the last two stages.  I thought what would be helpful is
to go through the questions, remind everyone where we are, and the
discussions that we've had within the working group.  And then
afterwards everyone can go back and answer the questions on their
own, keeping in mind some of the things that we've talked about
previously.  And, you know, it gives you time to think about what we
discussed and to indicate whether, "Yes, I agree with that.  That
makes sense," or "I remember that discussion we had in Seoul a couple
days ago, and I think that was off base."  Whereas, before what we
did is kind of threw out the survey, had people answer, but they may
not have recalled some of the discussions that we actually had.  So
we'll try it this way with stage 3.  And, if it works, great.  We'll
do that for stage 4.  If not, we'll go back to the old way.  

So remember now with stage 3, again, is talking about the policies
and procedures surrounding the working groups.  We've already raised
the issue.  We've already had a vote by council to launch the formal
PDP.  

Now we are dealing with questions that surround the working group,
keeping in mind that the internal workings of the working group are
really for the working group working team that J. Scott has run.  And
some of you were sitting in through that meeting.  

So I'm going to look on with -- because I can't read that far.  Any
way you can make that bigger?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I can make it bigger, but then you can only see
a very small bit of the question.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I can read them anyway.  I'm sure the people who
are transcribing can't read it back there.  So the first overall
topic --

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Is that better?

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  This is not Adobe or anything like that, is it?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  No.  I don't think I can get it up there, either.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Sorry.  That would have been --

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Like this?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah, you can actually send out a link to the survey.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  It's not open yet.  I can open it, but then I
can not edit it.  If we want to edit any more, people ask questions. 
Oh, maybe we should ask this or that.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I'll read through the question, and then we can
just take it from there.  So the first question we talked about was,
"What should be the role of face-to-face meetings with working
groups, if any?"  The overall topic, again, is how to maximize the
effectiveness of a working group.  So the question that came up was,
"What should be the role of face-to-face meeting, if any?"  When we
discussed this issue -- sorry.  I'm still pulling it up on my
computer.  

The -- in the previous meetings we talked about that working groups
should be encouraged to consider organizing face-to-face meetings at
ICANN events and that it should not be mandatory to meet -- what we
discussed was that it shouldn't be mandatory to meet at -- for
working groups to have face-to-face meetings, but it's certainly
encouraged at ICANN meetings.  And face-to-face meetings outside of
ICANN meetings could be desirable in certain circumstances; but then
you have to consider the issue of, you know, time, funding, and all
of the other things -- basically, people taking time away from their
other jobs to actually do that travel.

So that was overall what we had discussed on previous meetings.  And
I don't know if anyone has anything to add to that as far as what we
discussed or thoughts right now or if that's pretty self-explanatory.  

Okay.  Moving on, the next question that is on the survey is: 
"Should there be a mechanism external to working groups to report
issues observed about the activities of the working group?"  So
things like failures to meet deadlines or the chair is inactive or
unruly or, you know, the council liaison that's assigned to the group
is missing in action or is unresponsive and not able to deliver
reports to the council.  This is different -- this is a different
question than what the working group work team is tackling.  What
they're tackling is what if, within the working group, things aren't
working and they notice?  What is the working group -- what rights do
they have?  What procedures do they have to raise an issue to the
council?  This is more external from people at the council observing
some failings or misgivings at the working group level.  James?

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  This is James. Do we need both internal and
external accountability mechanisms like that?  I mean, I'm just
trying to understand are they duplicative or --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I think they certainly relate to each other.  I
don't think they're duplicative in the sense that in the working
group work team what they're discussing is really that it's really
the role of the liaison to bring those issues to the council.  

The question is:  What if the liaison is not showing up, is not
doing their job?  There's got to be -- it's part of the supervisory
role of the council to make sure that the working groups are
operating in the manner that they're supposed to be.  So we may not
need to add much to it.  We might -- a recommendation from us could
be that the working group rules that they're setting up really should
be the guidelines for how issues get raised, except in cases where
the council liaison is unable to or unwilling to raise those issues up.

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  So, I mean, I'm trying to play through the
scenarios where that might happen.  And I'm thinking if it were some
sort of a mutiny within the working group where the council liaison
was kind of leading the rebels against that.  But, otherwise,
wouldn't that role just somewhat by default fall to the chair?  You
have to give periodic reports to the council at least on the status
of the working group.  So I thought that that would be another check
on that process, so... 

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  It may be an extreme outlier.  It may be something
very extreme.  But, in some sense, the council -- it is pretty
extreme.  I'm following it through my head.  You could have the
council chair just goes AWOL, right?  I mean, it's happened before. 
I'm sorry.  The working group chair, sorry.  The working group chair
could just disappear or resign, say, "I'm done."  And maybe something
that the council -- right.  Maybe the council liaison is actually not
a participant in the group.  So, really, it's kind of -- should there
be any mechanism?  And your answer may be no, right?  This is a
survey question.  One of the responses could be, "No, I think it's
good the way it is."  

The next question is -- that's just related.  Okay.

All right.  This is a subject we actually spent a considerable
amount of time on, which has been something that people have observed
has not been -- we haven't had great access to other departments
within ICANN for questions that have come up.  So this is really
communication within different -- or with different ICANN
departments, for example, legal compliance.  So any time the working
group is trying to work on something and either they need -- they
have a legal question they need to raise or it's a question on
contract compliance, it's been difficult in the past -- the feedback
that we've gotten is that it's been difficult in the past to actually
raise those issues up to the respective ICANN departments.

And so the first question is: "Should there be some sort of
formalized mechanism to communicate with the Office of General
Counsel or other ICANN departments, if there are issues related to
scope, implementation, or compliance?"  And so, when we discussed
this issue internally, just to give you some more background, really,
what we had discussed was that it's important for -- it's important
for the working groups to have this kind of feedback from the
relevant ICANN departments.  But, having a formal mechanism, really,
is supposed to be done through the ICANN staff that's assigned to
that particular working group.  That it shouldn't necessarily -- that
the ICANN staff that's assigned to the working group can sort of
serve as -- in the gatekeeper function.  Because, you know, you could
imagine if every working group were able to have instant access to
anyone within ICANN staff within any department, I think that might
become a little bit unruly.

So I think that's really the nature -- I mean, there's some other
notes in -- that we discussed, which was initially the question only
related to scope, questions of scope.  But we broadened that out to
scope, implementation, or compliance.  There may be some other areas
that we just didn't include in the question.  So, if you have any
thoughts on what other areas might a working group need support from
ICANN within different departments, that's something to think about. 
Mike?

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Why don't you just leave it open?  Because,
really, you want to get at if there's any questions of relevance.  So
maybe say, if there are questions that may be relevant to such
departments, including but not limited to scope, blah, blah, blah.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah, I think that's --

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH: One more follow-up on that is this intending to
capture communication?  I think it's not.  It must be separate
questions, I'm hoping.  Communications with the SSAC or ccNSO or
other SOs or ACs?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN: That's a later question.  This section really just
relates to the ICANN staff.

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  Well, sorry. but that's a good point, though. 
Maybe not SSAC.  But perhaps the -- but, I'm sorry.  I forget his
name -- but the actual CSO and other resources on ICANN staff that
are in the security --

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I interpret that to mean as well, like, any
relevant ICANN staff related to the issues that are being identified.
So...

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  You're talking, James, if there's a question of
Greg Rattray or -- yeah, right.  That we should actually have a
mechanism -- or the ICANN staff that's assigned to the working group
should have some ability to be able to liaise between the working
group and that particular ICANN department to get answers to
questions that we might have.  So, Marilyn?

 >>MARILYN CADE:  And where do we address the question of resources
that are not inherent to the ICANN staff themselves but may need to
be procured?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  We have some later questions talking about things
like experts --

 >>MARILYN CADE:  Economic studies?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Experts, any kind of research, any kind of
analysis.  It's pretty broad.  So yes.  Yes, there are questions
there.  I know that's your -- one of your favorite subjects.

So moving on, the question is, if you answered yes, then do you have
any suggestions on how that mechanism should work?  Again, the
working group -- our discussions previously were of the nature that
it's really the job of the ICANN staff that's assigned to the working
group to deliver those messages, to make sure that we get the input. 
There's some new people at this meeting.  And it sounds pretty
obvious that that should be something that should happen.  It's
something that hasn't happened very effectively in the past.  So it's
something that we're calling out because of that.  Mike?

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Isn't this already done and resolved?  I
thought the president's committee or whatever, basically, came out
and said you have to link policy development with strategic planning
and budgeting.  Wasn't that correct?  I just don't want to keep -- I
don't want to keep talking about things that have already been
discussed and resolved elsewhere.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Right.  So that is the overall directive.  And then
the question for us to think about is:  How do you do that or do you
do that at the working group level?  It's not whether you should. 
It's how should that be done.  

And, again, this is a tough one that we talked about within the
group.  Because it's very much abstract.  And, to be honest, the
group didn't really come up with too much on our calls as to how you
would do that.  But we note that it is -- it is mentioned in the
board governance committee report, which is where, you know,
ultimately, we derived our charter from.  So, if there's any thoughts
-- I mean, and on this subject, we were kind of at a loss for words
when we brought it up on the call.  Because, as you said, obviously,
there should be some link.  So how does that fit in with the day-to-
day activities of the working group?

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  I think, if I'm not correct, in the last
strategic plan and/or budget, it listed what staff thought were the
policy development priorities.  Correct?  So maybe it just needs to
be a correlation between that and what council thinks are the
priorities.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  One of the issues that was raised in the
discussions in the work team was, well, often strategic planning and
budgeting is done quite a bit in advance.  And a lot of policy issues
that are on the table are more like suddenly has become an issue or
priority. And I don't think much discussion actually goes into, okay,
what are the overall strategic planning and budgeting areas before
the council decides oh, that's an issue we want to raise.  So I don't
know if, indeed, there should be some kind of mechanism to go about
saying, "Oh, well, this is not within the strategic planning.  So
maybe we should wait or put it in next year."  So these are some of
the questions the group struggled with.

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Maybe a new council -- each year the council
has to set its priorities.  One of the inputs, obviously, is the
strategic plan and the budget. And, to the extent that there are
discrepancies between the two different prioritizations, they need to
be understood and communicated.  But, ultimately, the council, since
it's in realtime rather -- well, that's kind of funny to assume.  But
is more relatively in realtime than is the strat plan and the budget,
which are passed. Obviously, the council's priorities have to take
precedence.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Marilyn?

 >>MARILYN CADE:  So let me just introduce another phrase. 
"Operational plan," right?  So the strategic plan is the three-year
cycle.  But there is a one-year plan, which is a -- sorry.  There's a
one-year element, which is the operational plan.  The strategic plan
is updated as well.  So I think the purpose was to say there needs to
be a flow upward from the development SOs and advisory groups into
the strategic planning process as opposed to just into the strategic
plan.  That would address, I think, Mike, your point that, you know,
the council, generally, can predict the work it's going to do for the
year.  But it can't totally predict it, because things will come up
on a -- you know, on a quarterly basis that maybe the council will
decide to address.

But I think the meta planning that goes into the strategic and
operational plan, the point is to have a flow upward, I believe, from
the work of the councils -- the work of the SO policy councils for
resource purposes and for human -- for financial purposes, but also
for human resource planning.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Jaime?

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Jaime Wagner. I see two different answers to this
question.  One is that with respect to budgeting and the operational
role, we have to comply.  That's the simple answer.

But, with respect to the strategic -- or the relevance of the issues
that are raised at the level of the SOs or working groups, I think
there is a 2-way -- we should not only comply with strategic issues
that are -- with issues that are presently in the strategic planning,
but also there is a bottom-up -- we should relate with strategic
planning bringing new issues to this process of planning.  I think
that's what Marilyn was putting -- yeah.  Okay?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.  And I think that's good.  And what Marika
was saying -- just said to me now is this is something that --
although it appears here in stage 3, it's also relevant to stage 1 as
to when this whole process starts, especially as you're talking about
strategic planning, right?  Once you get to the working group phase,
you're already well into it.  I think this is also kind of a Phase I
issue of just raising the issue completely and the whole issue of
prioritizing issues.  Should this be something we deal with now. 
James?

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  I just was thinking a little bit about what
Marilyn was saying earlier.  It's possible -- and it seems likely --
that most of the PDPs, at least the ones I've been involved in, will
outlive at least one or possibly two budgetary or operational plan
cycles.  So what could possibly happen if the priorities of the
budget or the operational plan changed?  Can they change the priority
or even obsolete PDPs that are currently in process?  And do we need
a mechanism to test for that?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Liz?

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Just a quick additional question on that one. 
Marilyn's brought up a couple times in the past a need for external
advice.  How is it currently allocated in the operational plan for,
let's say, specialist -- economic, legal, additional advice that
would be included in policy development process?  How is that
budgeted for?  Because that's an additional resource that's needed
here.  Do you want to link it in this question?  Or is there a
general bucket of policy development additional resource that ought
to be made available?  And we've got plenty of previous budgets to go
on to look at what could be the run rate for prior budgeting
planning.  You could recommend that you did a discretionary amount of
money that's available to the council for distribution and
disbursement to the working groups for additional advice that they
need in a policy development process.  That may be a different
workaround.  

And, I'm sorry.  I didn't identify myself at the beginning.  This is
Liz Williams.  I'm sorry, scribe.  So you might want to just take
that around the other way, given the life cycle of a policy
development process.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I think just to add -- this is Jeff.  Just to add to
that, we do address it or we did address it  in -- it's at least in
stage 2, probably in stage 1 as well.  It's not only resources you
might need once the working group is formed, but there are resources
even to understand the issue and narrow the issue down.

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS: You mean in terms of scoping?  So that's a stage 1
issue, yeah?  And, to go to Mike's point about the council being
responsible for prioritizing their issues, part of that
prioritization ought to be based on economics and financing of what
money is available at the very beginning of the year to say we cannot
possibly do 10 PDPs in one year because that is, first of all, not
feasible; secondly, not economic; thirdly, a waste of resources.  So
that filtering process for this question can be handled at other
points in the process.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.  And we had discussed on the calls -- and I'm
looking at the notes.  By the way, the notes of all our calls are
kept on the Wiki.

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  I know where they are.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  And there's a good chart that we keep updating with
all of these.  That's where I'm reading from.  

We had talked about -- it's pointed out by the group that there's no
insight as to how the council working groups are operating against
the budget that is allocated for its operational activities.  And how
decisions are taken on what gets funded and what doesn't, staff was
requested to obtain further information on this process internally.

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Jeff, just to supplement you, also, this goes back
to your previous slide, which had stage 5, which is assessment and
evaluation.  This is a very, very clear.  "Have we been effective? 
Have we used money effectively?"

For example, I'll use an easy one that exercised you for a long time
and me, Jeff.  The PDP February '06.  That PDP took 18 months, cost
$3 million.  This is not real figures.  This is hypothetical figures.

to go back and assess the cost and effectiveness of a PDP is a very
nice way of then saying is this a useful expenditure of corporate
resource and can we solve a problem like contractual compliance or
ICANN contracts or registries or new TLD process in a different way
that is more efficient?  You can't make that judgment unless you know
how much you've spent, how long it's taken, over what period of time,
and then look back historically.  So it would be helpful to add that
piece of analysis into stage 5 as well.  Because you want to be able
to analyze effectiveness.  And you certainly don't add into that
equation the cost of people who are not staff members who aren't a
cost center for the organization.  But you certainly want to analyze
that with respect to, for example, the IRT process, which funded 15
people to go to 10 meetings to produce X result as part of that PDP
process.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Any other comments on that one?  And we can
jump down.  This one also had a bunch of discussion on it, and it
related to a number of different stages as well.  And it comes up
here, which is: "Should there be a process to defer policy
development activities that are expected to result in significant
costs and/or resources?"  In other words, if it requires expert
analysis and/or research.  We've tackled this issue a couple times in
different ways.  The -- what this is specifically -- what this is not
asking, which we've already tackled in other stages, is should there
be a mechanism for a group or for the council to recognize that
there's an issue that needs policy development but just hold off on
it because there's resources allocated to other PDPs or there's too
many going on right now?  This is the question of what if the council
feels that there should be a PDP but it's going to cost a lot to get
the expert advice that you need and there's no room in the budget at
this point in time to actually do it?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Or it might be also a scenario where a working
group has started its work, realized it actually needs a lot of
additional information or resources.  Should it be able to say, okay,
we put the PDP on hold until we have received that information or the
studies have been done?  I think that's another scenario that could
be foreseen in this process.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I'm going to go to Mike, and I'm going to go to
Marilyn because of her facial expression.

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  Is it another option that ICANN find the
budget, tap into the reserves, does whatever it needs to do in order
to handle the policy development prioritization of the council?  Can
we ask a question along those lines?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I don't understand your question.  Isn't it a
decision of the council?  Of course, there's a budget.  But the
feedback that staff gives back saying we can do this, but it means
other things won't get done.

 >>MIKE RODENBAUGH:  But the council is not given a budget, right? 
I've never seen a budget.  I don't know what the budget is for
council policy development.  But I certainly don't want staff or
ICANN coming back and saying that, well, the GNSO thinks this is a
priority, but it's not in the budget.  I think that's never happened.
I doubt it would ever happen.  But it just seems completely
unacceptable.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I do -- it sort of came up in a roundabout way with
the WHOIS studies.  They didn't say -- ICANN staff never said, We
can't do it."  But they said, "Let's prioritize it. Let's narrow it
down and figure out a feasible way to do the WHOIS studies.  We can't
do them all at once."  It's kind of a roundabout way of ICANN staff
saying, "Slow down.  We can't really do all of this at once.  We've
got to figure out how to make it cost effective."  And maybe -- I
don't know if Liz has any thoughts on that.

>>LIZ GASSTER:  My recollection on the WHOIS studies is that it
wasn't really a budget issue.  It wasn't staff pushing back to say,
We can't do them all in that particular case.  It was, you know, the
community recognizing it didn't make sense to necessarily do them all
at one time, that they probably couldn't all be done at one time, and
that no one even really knew how much we were even talking about, how
expensive they were.  

So before you could even get to the point where you could say, Is
this within the ICANN's budget to do, you have to know how much they
even cost to do.  It just hasn't sort of gotten there yet.

I think it might be an emerging issue in the sense that if I get
these responses to the RFPs back and they're millions -- each one is
a million dollars, how would we decide?  But it would have to be --
that's why -- actually, that's why it said council and staff together
would then decide because there would have to be, you know, some
commitment on the part of ICANN to fund and set money aside.

But it has not been addressed yet.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I'm going to go to Liz.  Sorry, Liz Williams.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Sorry.  I didn't want to cut across you.  One of
the difficulties with this -- and Mike is correct to say that there
isn't a council budget.  And there has long been a need for it, not
that the council has the right to dispense the funds but that they
are responsible for expenditure of corporate resources.

One of the problems with this is the reverse, is that using the --
and I hesitate to say this, using the excuse of budgetary restraint
is insufficient reason to say, "We don't want to do that PDP because
we don't have money in the budget," which artificially constrains a
policy development process to that which suits those who have money
coming in -- the cause of money coming into the organization.  It is
a very, very tricky area.

Even though I like to see much more operational and financial data
being made available, it would be a terrible situation if we were in
a position where because of the nature of weighted voting, you
weren't able to have a WHOIS study that was required by some in the
community under the pretext if there was not sufficient budget or
resources to be doing it.  And I think that's a very dangerous road
to go down.

I just urge some caution, even though I err on the side of saying
let's have rigor and understanding about how much a PDP costs and
whether it is an effective way of establishing policy.  

But we certainly do not want that to be the block or the barrier to
doing work that is, indeed, uncomfortable and contentious and
difficult.  And the hand-off reason might be, Well, sorry, we haven't
got budget this year.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Marilyn, did you have a comment?  And then James.

>>MARILYN CADE:  I think a lot of what others have said is probably
where I would like to see us go on this.  

Governance of the unique indicators in the single authoritative root
is ICANN's only business.  It is their only product.  That's the only
reason that they, us, exist.

And in order to fulfill their mission, they must deliver bottom-up,
consensus-based, informed policy.  

So I think the council needs to be clear that that means it has to
be properly resourced.  And so to -- to a point that Mike was making,
that means that the responsibility of the organization is to come up
with the appropriate resources to make appropriate bottom-up,
consensus-based, informed policy.  That's their product -- our product.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Thanks.  James?

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Thanks.  The first part of my comment was going to
be that you forgot Marilyn, but that's taken care of.

The second thing was maybe I'm reading this question a little
differently.  When it says, "significant costs and/or resources," one
of the first things that popped in my mind was deferring an ongoing
PDP in anticipation of some future event or future data or future
study.  So it was time as the cost as opposed to a financial cost and
how could the resources that were currently engaged with the PDP be
allocated to something else in the interim, you know, whether that
was staff or even, you know, speaking as an overwhelmed volunteer,
the other folks that are participating from the community.

And then the final point was just that -- you know, I think, Mike, I
think the GNSO should be -- this is just a soapbox moment here.  But
I think the GNSO should be asking for a budget because I think that
in the absence of one, how can you control for any sort of activity? 
Otherwise, what happens is, in my opinion, the ICANN capacity becomes
the variable and it will just essentially continue to grow and
continue to expand, not that we couldn't use a dozen more Maries and
Lizs around.  But it just seems that at a certain point you cannot
continuously throw headcount at a particular problem to address what
is essentially a management of that resource issue.

So I think you should be asking for a budget.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Marilyn's got a thought on that.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Let me make a distinction -- Marilyn Cade.  Let me
make a distinction between the GNSO and the GNSO policy council. 
They are not the same thing.  The GNSO is a supporting organization. 
So I think -- I just wanted to clarify that what you were suggesting
was a budget specific to policy development.  And then I have a
follow-on --

>>JAMES BLADEL:  That is correct.  I apologize if I was a little too
cavalier with the acronyms.  We do that here.

>>MARILYN CADE:  I would caution against that idea.  And I really
think it takes a lot more discussion.  I think it is very, very
difficult to spend the time developing a detailed budget and to take
on the responsibility of managing that budget.  It also would be
unique to this policy council compared to the ALAC or compared to the
ccNSO.  I'm not sure you would achieve the objective you want, which
I think is to have adequate resources to do the job.

You would be taking on -- we haven't even finished GNSO
restructuring, so I would say you might want to tee that up for
discussion and consideration in the SO itself but also really think
through the consequences of it.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Just to respond, I agree it is not something to be
taken lightly but, I feel there is a train going down the tracks and
there is no dashboard in many cases.  It is difficult to see what the
performance is.

And some sort of at least a measure, if not an actual budget, will
be required in two situations:  One, in the final stage assessing the
impact or the implementation efficiency of the policy; and, secondly,
I think that there has been a lot of talk with the GNSO Council about
some sort of prioritization mechanism.  

I think both of those activities will be undertaken somewhat blindly
without some better data and control.  But it's -- I understand it is
teetering on the edge of a couple different cliffs.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Let me go to Liz Gasster.

>>LIZ GASSTER:  This is more of a question.  We spend a lot of time
talking in a way -- distinguishing between incurring additional cost,
actual costs like hiring consultants to do WHOIS studies, bringing in
experts who charge fees to provide, say, technical assistance versus
the resources both staff and community to take on additional projects
with a full plate.  

I'm asking whether it would make more sense to word this question in
a more granular way to avoid confusion among respondents in trying to
decipher here whether we're talking about a prioritization and work-
volume issue -- because I think you could read this question to be
that -- or we're talking about, Gee, we have a real additional
incremental expense that we're considering, like hiring an expert or
conducting a study with outside resources where there's an additional
dollar -- incremental dollar cost that would have to get approved and
funded by someone.

So we spend a lot of time trying to differentiate those two areas,
and it might be helpful to break them out.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Thanks, Liz.  I think that's a good idea.  I think
we are going to break those into two different questions.  

Okay?  Any other comments?

I want to jump to the next area, which is on public -- I believe it
is on public comment periods.  So let me see if I remembered that
right.  Okay.  So the first question is, "Should there be
requirements or guidelines for which elements a public comment period
should contain?"  Let me find the background on this one here.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  The word "elements" here needs clarification. 
Which elements?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So, yeah.  I'm sorry.  I'm looking through the notes
here.  Why don't you give a little history.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  The idea behind this question is if you look at
the current bylaws, for example, an initial report or final report, a
specific criteria or an issues report, what elements those documents
should contain.  So the question here is partly should something
similar be developed for a public comment period?  What kind of
elements should be contained in a request for public comment?  And
this might be as well, you know, saying a requirement.  It might be
something that the group might want to have in the bylaws, or it
might just be guidelines that you can tell a working group, Look, if
you are running a public comment period, you should really put in
there a deadline, links to relevant information, you know, ask the
charter questions, take the opportunity to maybe ask for further data
or information.  So that was the idea behind the question, I think.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  You just kind of summarized the notes that are on
it, which is good.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  The question should be more specific because the
obvious answer to this is yes, okay?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  I mean, just to point out, of course, the survey
should be read together with the notes document which further
information/explanation is provided.  The survey does assume that
people have seen those documents before and some of the --

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Sorry.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  No, no.  Just to explain, and I'm happy to
provide information here.  That's why in some of the questions, there
is more information.  It is just not here.  It is in the other
documents.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Thanks, Marika.  I think it is a good point.  So
when we sent out the survey formally, we'll attach the notes to it so
you can, when you are filling it out, get some more of the context.

We were just trying to write up the questions, and some of them got
kind of long when we were trying to reflect the notes so we were
trying to do it in shorthand.  But I think you're right.

Liz?  

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Just a quick question, Jeff.  What response rate
are you getting on your surveys?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  From the group?  Pretty good actually.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Broader than this group?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  The surveys normally are just sent out to the
group.  I think on the first one we had, like, 14.  And the second
one we had to encourage people a few times.  I think we had, like, 12.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  The reason why I ask the question -- it goes to
Jaime's point as well.  As a plain English language person, it is
quite awkward language when you are asking a question in a survey. 
So, for example, "Should there be guidelines for public comment
periods?"  Yes, there should be so people understand what public
comment periods are for and public comments are really, really
important in policy development processes.

And if you said yes -- because I believe they should be
incorporated.  Then if you go to 14, it says, If you answered yes to
the previous question, provide your feedback on what a public comment
period should include.  And that will be your thing about links and
about the relevant documents and about what standing the public
comments have and how the public comments are treated so there is a
little bit of a clarifying language around there which would be a bit
easier.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Thank you, Liz.

Any other comments on that?  Really this question kind of sets up
the basis for all the following questions.  So 15 is -- again, I'm
going -- because I can't read that -- Should a working group be
required to conduct a public workshop during a public comment period
to provide an update on the status of the work and solicit public
input?

Okay, this is a very specific question that the group had talked
about -- I'm sorry, I thought I heard something -- that we discussed
whether as part of a public comment period should ICANN do a Webinar
to -- as another form of soliciting comments.  

And then when we discussed it, essentially the group said that
sounds like a good idea.  We think it should be an option available
to the working group, but we don't think at this point it should be
made mandatory.  

And then I asked a question for people to think about, well, should
we -- we know it is optional, but do you put that -- when we do our
report, do you make that a recommended, like a best practice?  

Because we keep having different -- this comes up over and over
again.  What we like to ask people is, okay, is something optional,
recommended or mandatory, right?  "Recommended" meaning the best
practice.  So is it optional, best practice or mandatory?

So, again, interested in thoughts on this.  What we had discussed
was it sounds like a good idea to have but completely at the option
of the working group.  

So I see Marilyn, James.

>>MARILYN CADE:  So here's my comment.  I may have a view on the use
of Webinars, but I'm going to express a view on the term "best
practice."  "Best practice" means you have experience doing it.  It
is well-established as a practice.  It is a customary practice that
has been tried.

You might want to put it on an optional list, but I don't think you
should call it a best practice until you have actually tried it and
assessed its impact.  So I'm just -- if you call something a "best
practice," you're basically saying that is the standard that you
should adhere to.

And I think what you really want is a list of the kinds of
mechanisms that could be used which might include a Webinar or other
things rather than saying Webinars might be best practice.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah, I apologize for that term.  Actually the term
I use is "optional" or it is something we "recommend" or it should be
"mandatory."

>>MARILYN CADE:  I'm just going to go back to, do we have
experience?  A lot of trade associations, et cetera, do Webinars.  I
think we're just beginning to experiment with the use of Webinars at
ICANN, and we're not doing assessments as far as I can tell of the
participants to see if they are really effective.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So your answer is "optional."

James?

>>JAMES BLADEL:  That's a good point.  We did have a few not
Webinars but workshops, I think, in Mexico City for registration
abuse, and I think they're helpful.  Just to reiterate, I think one
of my comments on the calls, you have to be careful with the term
"recommended" because if a group feels a certain approach is optional
but recommended, then the onus -- or the justification is there to
understand why it isn't being done.  And so just by default, it kind
of gets into being -- becoming a back-handed requirement.  

And I just want to make sure that we're making that distinction when
we say something is recommended because now it doesn't even really
take necessarily -- just looking ahead and playing this out, it
doesn't necessarily take a consensus of the working group to call for
a workshop if it's recommended.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I think that's fair.  The other point -- and then
I'll go on, the other point that was raised during our discussions
were that we talked about different types of public comment periods
within a working group.  There's one that's in the past and one that,
I think, the group has discussed continuing, which is that happens
right when the working group is formed, right, to basically help the
working group figure out some of the issues that are out there and
where people stand on that.

So some people had said, Well, it might be an option to do that for
the first public comment period, maybe not the other public comment
period.  So it's -- again, it is an option.  It's on the menu of
things that a working group has to choose from.

So I will go to Jaime.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Marilyn, I would agree with you on the term of
"best practice," avoiding it.  I would consider a Webinar or any form
of hot change, not written but online conversation, it's much more
effective.  And you don't need to have an experience with that to
assess it.  It is much more effective in this mirror exchange of e-
mails.  I think I would recommend and not only say it's optional.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Marika?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  I think another idea that was discussed in this
context in the "optional" category was that such a public comment
period or such a workshop or Webinar could be used at the start of
the public comment period to actually inform people what is being
asked and what the issue's about as well in a way to get more
relevant comments.  

I think we have all had an experience of public comment periods, all
kinds of information is submitted that's not the least relevant to
the issue that the working group is actually looking at.

It might be a way as well to educate those that are interested in
providing input on what it is that the working group is looking for
and which questions it's supposed to answer.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Let's go on to the next one.  I keep looking
up there.  It is much easier for me to look at the computer.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  You need new glasses.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I do.  You're right.  

"How should a working group obtain public comments from persons
and/or entities that do not participate in ICANN or other supporting
organizations or advisory committees?"  There's another question that
deals with getting input from constituencies and supporting
organizations and advisory committees.  

This question is asking for those that do not ordinarily participate
in the ICANN process, should there be some outreach done by a working
group or recommended to ICANN when there are public comment periods,
and how do you reach them?

I think we had several conversations on this one.  And, in fact,
some had raised a point that maybe it's not our responsibility to
reach outside of ICANN, that you can only do so much.  Is there any
other thoughts on this?  I think, Marilyn, you spoke to this issue.

>>MARILYN CADE:  I did.  The concern, I think, we have to have is to
balance being -- making informed, responsible policy with making sure
that we are also doing this in an environment where there's an
environment that is encouraging of the participation with the
broadest relevant group of stakeholders.

And I say that -- I'm going to give an example.  Scaling the root is
a -- probably a really interesting example of the fact that the
analysis has to be done by technical experts.  And taking an opinion
vote on whether or not you like the findings of that report really
isn't even relevant.

So I think we need to try to figure out in terms of making informed,
responsible policy, making sure we have an open environment, doing
other things to draw the broadest possible group of interested
parties into participate.

But I don't know that we can design a participation mechanism around
a particular policy development process.  At the same time, it would
be silly for us to develop IDN policy without drawing in IDN experts.
So, you know, I think we need to look at this and try to remember
what ICANN's mission is.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Thoughts on that one?

Okay.  So the next question was:  "What should a working group do to
obtain additional information related" -- Sorry, that's the one we
did.  Sorry, I forgot to turn ahead.  

"Which public comment periods should be mandated in the ICANN
bylaws?"  I think we just need to fix a little wording in there. 
Right now the bylaws have a public comment period that is at the
outset of the PDP process as the working group or -- well, it still
has "task force" in there but we are dropping it out.  

The bylaws basically say there is a mandatory public comment period
at the beginning and then there is a mandatory public comment period
after an initial report.  This sets up some of the other questions
later, so it may seem obvious.  But the question is:  Should there be
other mandatory public comment periods aside from the ones that
current exist in the bylaws?  Liz?

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  What's the purpose of them?  Because if you insert -
- for example, you've mandated two, beginning and end.  And a public
comment period takes 21 days?  30 days?  60 days?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  That's actually another question, yeah.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Yeah.  So let's say you want to have an efficient,
relatively open, productive working group process, if you insert,
say, a third mandated public comment period in the middle or one for
the council or one for the GAC or whatever you want to do, then you
insert in the process before you finalize a potential recommendation
for a potential policy change a time period that has a direct bearing
on the effectiveness of the work.

So instead of saying, Which public comment period should be
mandated, the other way to ask the question is around the other way
to say, is there any value in additional public comment periods that
should be mandated?  Because you have to ask the purpose question for
public comment periods.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  So then you would assume that those that are
currently mandated stay there.  That's your assumption there?

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Absolutely, sure.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  I think the question is, in this way is more
open, should any of them be mandated?  I think that's what the
working group discussed as well.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  I was always working under the assumption that
public comment periods are mandated and would remain so.  So I
misread that as an additional one.  So if I misread it, then I'm
guaranteeing others would misread it, too.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  I think this relates as well to the discussion we
had on the public comment period that's currently mandated for the
initiation or management of the initiation of the PDP.  I think
around there we had some discussions, okay, so which -- and I think
it relates as well back to output, the question that comes later, are
there any kinds of different outputs that you are going to have from
a working group?  And how would it link to the public comment
periods?  And which of those do you mandate?  

If you have more different outputs, you might need to require more
different public comment periods?  Would you mandate those or not? 
And what do you do with the ones that are currently in the bylaws
that are mandated?

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Well, perhaps, then one ought to go back to tors
and say, what's the most effective way of having any public mandated
periods?  Just because they are mandated in the bylaws now does not
mean to say that they ought to stay there in perpetuity.  

So there is no reason to say across the stretch of a whole PDP
process from rabbling around in this room about an issue that
exercises five people and then 20 and then 100 and getting it from
that point to a board recommendation that it's a vote that then goes
out for a board report, for example, across the continuum of the
whole process, not just this working group process.

Where is it most desirable to have mandated public comment periods?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I think that's a good point.  We actually spent some
amount of time on one of the calls talking about whether the initial
public comment period that's currently mandated in the bylaws has
value.  And while at first some people question that, I think in the
end what was discussed with the members of the group was that it
really gave the people in the working group something to build off
of.  Whereas, a lot of times you'll get an issue thrown upon this
working group.  When you have public comments that are coming in, it
helps you to shape those.

Then the group also talked about having additional public comment
periods but not official mandated ones that you would see in the
bylaws.  For example, there have been groups that have just sent out
questions that say, Look, we just have questions we want people to
provide input on.  It is not a technical public comment period.  It
is not one that's mandated but it is at the option of the group.

Is there anyone -- I know James was in the queue, and then I will go
back to Liz and Jaime.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Yeah, and I think I was one of the outspoken ones
that was saying that those early and initial public comment periods
seem to be, you know, becoming less and less relevant, especially if
there were, for example, comments on the issues report and comments
on the PDP as it was going through the council.  It seemed like, you
know, this was just piling on.

And then the second thing -- and I know it's not a popular position
to take, and I don't hold it very strongly, but it is just more of an
idea that at some point the openness and the input through the public
comment period needs to be balanced somewhat with the contribution of
the folks who are volunteering on a weekly or daily basis.  

I feel a lot of times I have been in groups where public comments
have taken the discussion in a new and interesting direction that was
completely overlooked over the course of many months by the working
group.  But I've also seen where folks who have worked on something
for the better part of a year had a public comment come in and just
kind of, you know -- what do I want to say here -- turn something
around at the last 11th hour.  

And I think that in some way is a diminishment of the contribution
of the folks that had worked on something for that time.  And
certainly the comments of those types should be seen as a recruitment
to "Please, come, get involved with this group."  

I just wanted to make sure that we're recognizing that there is a
balance at a certain point and we don't want to go too far, either
extreme by overloading public comment periods, either required in the
bylaws or even optional.  Again, if a tool is there it will be used
or you will have to justify why you are not using the tool.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Thanks, James.  I'll go to Liz.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  One of the other pieces of the puzzle about public
comment periods is they're terribly important, because it gives an
option for people to participate.

Using them too often means that people ignore them.  There is not a
defined, concrete point to say, "This is now a crunch point.  Speak
now, forever hold your peace."  This public comment period is
important.

So used judiciously and used seriously, public comment periods are
very, very helpful.  Used too often and capriciously, I think you
then waste your time.

So the other -- the more important question for me is not how many
ought to be mandated, it's what you do with the stuff when you get it
and how that's reflected into the results of the process.  And I
remember a very, very funny exchange I had with Danny Younger, who
was a grand public commenter over many, many years and he said to me
one day, "You just don't even read them."  And I said, "Yes, I darn
well do, you know, do you want the binder?"  So the point of telling
that little story is that people have to feel that it's worth the
candle for them submitting a public comment period because the
material that they do submit is worthy and valuable, and it is going
to go somewhere.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  And you've just jumped ahead to the next question.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Oh, I'm sorry.  I'm sorry about that.  I didn't
even --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  But you're absolutely correct that that is --

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  I didn't even know.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Jaime, I know, had a comment.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Yeah.  I think the -- an initial comment period is -
- it's okay to give input, but I think a final one on controversial
matters is also mandatory.  But it depends on the issue, if it is
controversial, you know?  Then it should be mandatory.

It means what kind of consensus has the people who worked will
achieve in the community at large.  That is this -- this final
comment period would be a kind of a thermometer of this consensus,
and I think this should be mandatory in this event.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Right.  So right now, in the bylaws there's a
mandatory public comment period at the beginning, and then there's a
mandatory one after a -- what's called currently initial report.

So those two are in the bylaws now, and so our question, since we're
tackling the entire PDP process, do we keep those the way it is?

And the feedback that the group has gotten is:  Yes, those should be
kept in as mandatory.  There hasn't really been -- I mean, James is
saying maybe the value at the beginning is becoming less and less,
but most of the people in the group are saying at this point we
should keep those in the next version of the PDP Version 2.

The next -- Question 20 talks about exactly what Liz had kind of
begun to introduce, which is:  Okay, now that you've got these --
this public comment period, that's great.  What do you -- what do you
do with the comments that you receive?  And how do you let others
know that you've actually read those comments and have taken them
into consideration?

And one of the first things we did, because it came about -- this
topic came about right about the time as the affirmation of
commitments came out, and so we took a look at that document, and I
think, you know, to basically summarize -- and don't quote me on
this, but essentially the affirmation of commitments has a section in
there that talks about, you know, "You must consider those comments
that you receive and you must deal with those in an open and
transparent manner and provide an explanation as to, you know, what
you did with those comments," essentially.

And so the work team agreed that some guidance on what to do -- what
a working group must do might be helpful but debated whether such
guidance should be mandatory or optional and most agreed that a
working group should provide a detailed explanation as to why or why
not comments were considered and incorporated into a report.

So Liz?

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Jeff, one of the things that would be helpful to
answer this question is to manage public comment as expectations from
the beginning.

So going further back up to -- you know, back up to your previous
questions to explain what a public comment period does, it's of grave
disappointment to many people that despite their public comments,
those comments are not ignored, they're read but then they're
discarded.

So in -- and rightly so.  Because it's -- if it's -- if we're using
consensus, if we're using Rafferty's Rules of rough consensus and
general agreeable ways of doing things, then quite often the left and
right of the public -- you know, the far left and the far right -- is
ignored for the greater good of the middle.

Setting a set of expectations about what public comments can do in a
process is going to help you here, because public comments quite
often are off-topic, irrelevant, a general rant, not helpful at all,
particularly at the level of a working group.  If it was public
comments that were relating to a board review that the board was
considering something about making changes to something significant
and structurally in the organization, that's a very different ball of
wax than a public comment period at the low level of a working group.

And this, again, is another question about where you insert a public
comment period, in which piece of the process.

And public comment periods can be -- public comments can go ignored.
They can be read and discarded and said, "Thank you very much, but
no."  So that's an expectation-setting exercise.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.  I think and that brings up a -- you know,
another topic that we discussed.  You know, one of the outputs of
this group is to make recommendations as to changes to the bylaws,
but another thing this group talked about was doing a kind of a
manual of -- or instructions -- not instructions but kind of a
guideline or a guidebook as to what is the policy development process
and what -- as you said, what relevance does -- or what types of
comments are helpful, what does a working group generally do with
those comments.  You know, as kind of a guideline for people to read
on the process for -- especially for newcomers who have this
expectation, "Well, if I'm filing comments, then, you know, they must
be considered."

But also for working groups, what to do with those comments, because
oftentimes you'll get comments for things that the group has already
considered, so the working group should make it known that, "Yes,
we've got these comments and we've already considered it, but decided
to go in this direction for these reasons."

So Marilyn?

>>MARILYN CADE:  So in light of what Liz said, and what you just
said, how do the two of you respond to the, I think, fairly urgent
requirement -- and I think acceptance of that by at least the chair
of the board -- that comments that are received must be acknowledged
and an explanation provided on how they're dealt with in the public
comment process that the board operates?  Are we saying that we have
a much lower standard but we're the policy development organization,
the board is not.  The board is taking comments on policy
recommendation -- other things as well, but on policy recommendations
that are put forward from this organ.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  I didn't -- I think when I gave my answer, I'm not
sure I said that they should -- shouldn't be acknowledged or that
they shouldn't --

>>MARILYN CADE:  Well, I was -- one thing that Liz said which maybe
just -- you know, they could be discarded.  I didn't --

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Sorry.  Let me clarify.

My view is that anyone who bothers to participate at any point in
the process through a public call for comments must have an e-mail
back that says, "Thank you very much, we really appreciate your
input, and this is the next step in the process."

>>MARILYN CADE:  Okay.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Yeah.  Not because they're discarded because they
come at this level of the process, meaning they're meaningless. 
They're very meaningful.  But that they need to be handled in a way
that, one, acknowledges the input, and two, then quite clearly sets
the expectations of what a working group is to do with those public
comments.  And actually making the distinction that you've made,
Marilyn, about board asking for public comments, that's a different
thing than in the policy development process for asking for public
comments.  It's the same outreach, it's the same seeking views, but
it's a little bit of a different process here.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Sort of a follow-up comment.

The present accountability mechanisms, as inferior and weak as they
are, do at least include a reference to the fact that you can be
harmed by the failure of staff or the board to take into account
information that may have affected a policy decision, and so one of
the things to kind of think about tracing backward -- right? -- is: 
What are we doing in the process we're operating that documents that
information was received, how it was dealt with, et cetera?

Because right now, you know, the only place you can -- a member of
the community can actually seek reconsideration is at the board level
in terms of a policy, "Have you been harmed by action or a decision?"

But it is -- that determination is based on whether or not
information was received and then addressed, which I would think if a
policy development process receives information, disregards or fails
to take into account information that would have changed the policy
that is recommended, that that would also be a relevant grounds for
seeking reconsideration of a policy.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Let me go to Jaime.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  What I think is that the type of acknowledgement
that is needed is not only to say, "Well, okay," but also what was
done with the contribution.  And I think there are three categories
or -- well, a contribution can be discarded, or it can be considered,
or it can be filed as a minority viewpoint.  These are the three ways
I understand a contribution should be acknowledged.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Thank you.

Going on to the next subject, which was also brought up, is:  How
long should a public comment period be?  And again, I'm paraphrasing.
And should there be a difference -- let me read from here.  Sorry. 
This is bad.

Should there be a difference between the length of a public comment
period and the submission of constituency statements.  I think I
worded that too quickly.

What I was trying to ask here is right now there's -- there have
been some people that have said, "Well, it takes longer to get a
constituency or stakeholder group statement than it does to submit an
individual public comment period," so some had brought up the
question of whether they should be -- although they run parallel,
whether there should be a longer time period to allow for
constituency or stakeholder group statements.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  (Speaker is off microphone).

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Right now, they don't always running parallel, but --

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  (Speaker is off microphone).

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  What's that?

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Should they run parallel?

>>JAIME WAGNER:  No.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  I think not.  Unless there's a very tight coupling.
Is a constituency statement influenced by public comments?  Probably.
Should it be?  Maybe.  Would it be fully informed?  Don't know.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Well, if you don't -- so if you don't run them in
parallel -- and the group talked about this -- then you're extending
the process out much longer, right?  Because if you had a 30-day
public comment period, let's say, and then you had a 45-day
constituency statement, you know, you're already now talking 75 days
of public comment.

So the group had talked about that and the group did say -- at least
on those calls -- that they envisioned it should be parallel and that
30 days -- a 30-day public comment period, in general, was -- should
be enough time for both the public comments and the
constituency/stakeholders recognizing that a working group should
have the ability to extend that as needed.  So I'll go to Liz and
then Jaime.  Sorry.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Well, I have strong feelings about this anxious
approach, you know?  Because I think 75 days period is okay.  If we --
we intend to come up with something that is good, I don't know why --
why to put such a hurry in the process.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Maybe I should go to Mike Rodenbaugh.  I'm sure he's
got some ideas on extremely lengthy public comment periods.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Well, talking about anxious guys?

[Laughter]

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So, yeah, let me go to Liz.  Then James and then
Marika.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  I am a real meany when it comes to how long it
ought to take constituencies to get their act together, so I'm -- and
I'm completely -- would like them to act much more quickly and
thoughtfully and reasonably because that's why they exist, and they
ought to know what's going on.  That's their job.  To be on top of
stuff.  That's why they have councillors.  It's why they have little
working groups.  It's why they have rapporteurs.  So really and truly
raise the bar of expectation on what a constituency does because
that's what its job is, but then -- and so shorten the period.

But I'm with Jaime.  You're going to take 75 days anyway.  What PDP
ever, in ICANN, has taken -- I mean, come on.  Let's be realistic.

But longer public comment period and outreach that goes with it to
enable people to be properly informed and then submit cogent public
comments is much more useful than driving them down a 21-day really
limited time.  Especially if it's individuals that may be affected by
a policy development change or indeed corporations that need to seek
sign-off at different levels of an organization.  So make it harder
for constituencies to fiddle around and give opportunities for others
outside the tiny little nucleus of the working group to consider
what's going to have an impact on them.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So let me go to James.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  That -- that's a good point, Jaime and Liz, about
the 75 days.  Just one thought, however, is that that tends to
accumulate throughout the life span of a PDP and 75 days right there
in the beginning maybe takes a 6-month PDP and turns it into a -- it
might -- it multiplies down the road, so -- not always, it doesn't
have to, but it's certainly not something to get out of the gate with.

One thought I was having, when reading this question, Jeff -- and
maybe it's something I'm not as well versed as others are -- as we're
talking about the difference between a public comment and
constituency statement, it occurs to me that this might be a way to
essentially draw a distinction between the contributions that people
make as a part of a community versus on an individual basis, and I
think that, for example, you know, if a member of a constituency or a
stakeholder group has an interest or something to say with regard to
a particular issue, why wouldn't they be sending that through their
stakeholder group process, as opposed to also commenting separately
in the public comment.

So really what I was thinking is that this is drawing a distinction
between community comment and external to the community comment, as
opposed to public comment.  Does that make any sense?

This idea that, you know, we all wear a lot of hats, right?  I mean,
I'm with a registrar, with, you know, a contracted house of the GNSO
and all these other things, but I'm also a user and a registrant and
all these different things.  I may have different interests that
overlap, and I think that by making this distinction here, are we
saying that we're making a distinction between those individuals who
are participating and representing themselves, perhaps, or
representing entities and organizations outside of the ICANN
community versus those that are representing the positions within a
stakeholder group or a supporting organization within the ICANN
organization?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So one thing this question doesn't do is tell you --
or tell the working group -- and I think its purpose, we talked about
this, it's purposely done this way, it doesn't tell the working group
how to evaluate those comments.

So it doesn't say that constituency statements or stakeholder group
statements have more weight than public comment in general.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  But we're implying that if we're giving different
time frames to -- for example, if one group is given a first crack at
a comment or the ability to read the other group's comments first and
have a longer time to respond.

I think that you -- you know, in a way, you're setting a hierarchy
between those two types of groups.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.  I think --

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Not by intention, but just by -- by accident, I mean.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.  So when we were discussing this on the call,
the opinion was -- and again, this could change.  This is just what
happened on the call.  The opinion was that they should be run in
parallel, recognizing that a constituency statement may take longer
to put together than an ordinary public comment period, and,
therefore, giving some extra time for the constituency or stakeholder
group to get that statement in -- or, frankly, advisory committee --
for getting that statement in should be lengthened or could be
lengthened if the working group wanted to.  It wasn't -- but Liz has
introduced a different concept here -- Liz and Jaime -- where you're
talking about, well, maybe a constituency or stakeholder group wants
to see the public comments and make -- may react to that.  Which is
not something that at the time the working group had addressed, so
that's -- it's a new variable.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Well, like, for example -- I'm sorry, but as an
example, I could participate within the registrar stakeholder group
and go through their constituency statement and then turn around and
submit a separate comment that just essentially, you know, discredits
everything that they said and there's nothing -- there's no mechanism
to say that those -- are those comments treated by the working group
as equivalent.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Now, a point I just want to make is that I think
I argued as well for having, you know, no rule that they should run
in parallel based on practical experience, because I think what often
happens is that indeed the comments that -- or the questions that go
out for the public comment period are normally, you know, just a
chart of questions and, you know, the group might have some -- a
chance to discuss, you know, a bit more in detail on what information
you would like, but I think on the constituency statements, I think
what often happens in practice is that the person that's
participating in the working group is often also tasked to make a
first stab or provide some initial input on development of such a
constituency statement.

And I think there, there is a benefit for having some initial
discussions in the working group, so that they actually understand
and have really grasped what the issues are about, because what I've
seen I think if you do it too quickly, it might be that you haven't
gone into the detail of what is actually -- what information is
needed to answer those questions, which, you know, some input you
might not get from the public anyway or they might be able to do it
after the initial report once they've seen some of the deliberations.

But I think constituencies will benefit from those initial exchanges
to really discuss internally where you often have, you know, experts
or -- on those issues, to really go into the detail of what the
working group will need to answer those questions.

So I would be more of an advocate, as well, of definitely not
recommending to run them in parallel.  Of course trying to avoid to
have too much time so that the period extends over a longer period,
but I think there's benefit in, you know, both having them take the
course as is needed.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Could I -- I'm sorry.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Yeah.  Let me just go to Jaime and then I'll go back
to James.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Well, when James was speaking, and I think you,
Jeff, said that there is no difference in status between the
constituency statement and the public comment.

Well, a constituency has -- you, as part of the community, you have
the channels, and this channel is not a private opinion.  It should
be submitted to prior -- previous discussion with other members of
the constituency.

But then I -- and I thought that this type of approach should have
more consideration, because it has accumulated more discussion, more
prior discussion, okay?

So if it is done -- a contribution is done through a constituency, I
thought before that should be done more consideration than a public
comment.

But then I realized that a public comment can be done by a whole
federation of -- and subscribed -- but it can be as discussed as a
constituency, but -- so let's --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So I think -- so let me just -- on that one, I think
it may be worth answering a separate question that we don't -- or
asking a separate question that we don't currently have in here,
about the weight of public comments.

I think what I said is that the group did not discuss what we he
have should have, and I think for the reasons you're talking about.

Sometimes a working group may choose to give more weight to a
constituency or stakeholder group statement.  Sometimes they may
choose to give weight to a public comment that is received, whether
or not it's from an individual or from a federation.

It's really the merit of the comment itself, as opposed to who is
submitting it.  I mean --

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Yeah, but --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  But the point is that -- the point is we didn't want
to dictate, as the policy development process work team, we didn't
want to set forth a rule saying, "Working groups, you must consider a
constituency statement and weight it more heavily than a public
comment statement."  Right?  That's not something we as a group would
ever want to say.

It's really for the working group, their members, to determine how
to weigh a -- the discussion that we had was that it's for a working
group to weigh those comments as it wishes.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Let me rephrase my first approach.

I don't -- I don't feel that one should precede the other and one
group should read -- to rephrase, but I think 21 days or 30 days is a
small amount of period.

Now, it can be run in parallel, but I think it's too short a period,
30 days.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So what would be your recommendation?  How much
time?  The reason I ask is because it's really -- it's incumbent on
us to provide a guide -- if not a definitive time, you know, "It has
to be 30 days," it's incumbent on us to build in the recommended time
frames because that's currently something that's in the bylaws and
it's something -- it's an outcome that's expected of our group is to
produce those.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  Yeah.  I think both should occur in 60 days, okay? 
Both.  Either sequentially, but essentially in parallel.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  James?

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Yeah.  I was just -- that's a good idea, but I just
wanted to go back to the idea of them not necessarily happening in
parallel or how do we allow them to happen in parallel if one is
designed to take longer than the other.

And just the idea that that that takes longer should start earlier
so that they end about the same time -- and I think that that would
be conducive to a more effective flow in the work group, is that if
we are saying that constituency statements were to, say, take 60 days
where public comment was 45, for example, that that means the
constituency statements go out 15 days earlier, just so that they end
at the same time.

And then secondly, going back to one of the previous questions -- I
think it was on 15, when we were discussing the diminishing value of
front-loading multiple comments at the beginning, perhaps we were to
separate them, you know, and put constituency statements at the
beginning of a PDP in place of the initial public comment period. 
And then of course public comment and -- public comment and including
those from those who participate in constituency statements after the
interim or initial report and then kind of bring everybody back
together at the final report stage, and that was just a thought of
trying to maintain the value while keeping their different schedules
separate from one another and from colliding.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So just to repeat that again, so at the beginning
you would say -- and when you say "constituency," you mean
constituency, stakeholder group --

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Stakeholder groups.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Well, it could be a constituency.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Sure.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Under the model you have both.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Let's say internal to the ICANN community at the
outset of a working group, but the initial report or the interim
report that is generated is put out for public comment.

And this is what we're talking about requiring, as opposed to
leaving options for additional, if circumstances require additional
public comment.

And then of course everyone is -- both stakeholders, constituencies,
and the public are invited into the -- into the final comment periods.

So that's brainstorming at the table.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  The problem is that people with -- who are
volunteer or which are in charge have interest and have discussions,
but they should submit at the very beginning if -- to the -- to a
larger audience what are the -- the -- they may be driven in another
direction, okay?  That's the importance of the first public comment
period, I think.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Do you mean that they should be declaring their
interests when they participate in the group or when they're
submitting comment?

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  No, I mean -- when there is a first public comment
is over, something that is produced by the group, nuclear group,
okay?  And they should see that this first public comment period
serves to see if they are in the right direction.  If they -- if
there -- if this first public comment doesn't happen, they can work
too much in the direction that in the end the community or the larger
public says, "Well, that's not fit our interest."

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  I was presuming there would be other comments on
the issues as well.  It went through the issues report.  And, when it
went through the PDP at the GNSO Council, so --

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  But the sooner, the less work is wasted.

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  Okay.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Let me go on to the next part.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  That raised a really interesting issue, I think.  I
don't know if it's a tangent we want to get off on with this
particular work that's in our stages.  But the idea of statements of
interest, as, obviously, it's a part of -- I don't know if it's
mandated by the bylaws or it's just something we do.  Is it -- that's
a working group work team?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  For members to participate or -- 

>>JAMES BLADEL:  It's required of the folks who participate in the
working groups.  But it is even a consideration that that would be an
element that we would request for any public comments?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I think it's a very good suggestion.  Because I
did have someone recently asking on an update where we received so
many public comments about how many of those were actually received
by registrants or ordinary registrants and not with professional
interests.  I think that's an interesting idea to maybe have that as
part of the requirements for public comment period that people
identify at least their background or where they're coming from.

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  Of course, there's absolutely no way to know if
they're telling the truth.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  It's interesting.  Because one of the things that
the mailing lists do is they block out the email addresses, so you
can't even tell where they're coming from.  But ICANN staff can get
it.  That's a good point.  And it goes back to one of the earlier
questions at the very beginning of what elements should be required
in a public comment period.

 >>MARGIE MILAM:  Sorry.  We have such a hard time getting people to
participate on a public comment.  I hate to make it more difficult by
requiring them to put some -- not like a formal statement of interest.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  In the instructions that go out to solicit public
comments, it could say, "Please remember to indicate your name,
affiliation. And, if you're representing anyone other than yourself,
if you're representing an organization or whatever, please put that
in there."

 >>JAMES BLADEL: Some public comments come in, for example, just
with initials.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN: Let me go to Robin and then Avri.

 >>ROBIN GROSS:  This is an interesting idea worth exploring.  And
one possibility to think about it is having somebody say a statement
like whether or not they were paid, whether or not these comments
were prepared by a professional to represent someone else or if they
were not paid for by a -- or if they were not written by a third
party and paid for by somebody else.  We see that a lot in the legal
profession to help the court understand, for example, an amicus
brief, if it was drafted without compensation or if it was just on
its own initiative.  Just an idea.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Let me go to Avri, and then Liz is going to --

 >>AVRI DORIA:  Yeah.  It is, actually, an interesting idea.  And I
actually don't know that it is necessarily as hard to do.  Certainly,
you don't want something where it's a template that they have to fill
in.  But, if it's something that the group, in general, ended up
being considered worthwhile, they've gotten so good at having forms
that, you know, you fill out a form and attach your comment that --
basically, putting a bunch of check boxes and a couple fill-in
answers on a form would not be prohibitively difficult and wouldn't
necessarily be a barrier to -- the same sort of barrier that having
to sit down and think up one of those, you know, statements of
interest would be.  But a couple well-chosen check boxes and fill-in
things might satisfy the need.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Thanks.  Liz?

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Jeff, one of the things that I would have found
useful analyzing a lot of public comments is, if they arrived in a
relatively similar database form.  So, for example, if you have a
binder full of public comments and you mark them up and you say you
want to use them and they're very valuable to you, if you have no
search capacity across the commentary, then it's quite difficult to
say, "You know, we had a lot of comments that looked like this, and
quite a lot of people use the same phrases."  So, technically, from
Avri's point of view, it is actually very easy to improve the public
comment period where a public commenter is obliged to use a link that
takes them to a form that they fill in, which is quite a simple
database system.  Not dissimilar to this thing here like a ugov poll.
It's very straightforward.  

One of the other things that I also would like to address -- and
this was just brought up by Robin, which reminded me.  One of the
things that irritated the heck out of me was a whole lot of repeat,
repeat, repeat, 27,000 of the same darn thing, just sign on the
bottom here.  And that will be your public comment.  That could have
been said once with a set of signatories at the bottom so that it
comes to you once, not 25,000 times flooding your inbox.  So, if
there is an amicus brief kind of way of, you know -- let's use Robin
as an example.  Robin has got together 10 of her mates, and she
summits one set of public comments that reflect the views of 15
people or 25 individuals or 21 organizations.  It's actually much
easier to manage that in a public comment process, if you receive it
once and you know where Robin's -- you know, Robin's group are
getting it from than to receive it multiple, multiple, multiple
times.  That is really just an electronic petition form that is
misused and has been used in the past to skew a process.  So that
demeans the value of a public comment.  But I'm also conscious that I
understand exactly what Margie is talking about in terms of getting
people to participate.  Make it simpler.  Make it technically easier,
but also make it easier to use the output from the public comment
period.  That's a big challenge, because it's a lot of information.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I want to go to Marika who wants to comment on that
and then James and then Jaime.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS: I want to thank Liz for that excellent
suggestion.  It's a great way and it makes staff's lives a lot easier
as well in categorizing comments.  Normally, we ask specific
questions.  But people often go off on a tangent and talk about other
things.  If we boxes on the questions and still have an "other"
comment box, so we don't restrict them in answering.  It's a very
good suggestion.  I'll definitely I take that back and look into how
we can make that work.

 >>JAMES BLADEL: Just really quickly, I think the phenomenon that
Robin and Liz were describing was probably based on a
misunderstanding of how public comments are received, categorized,
and processed by the working group, and that all of those -- that
long list of respondents really, essentially, counts as one.  It's
not the same as sending your city councilman a stack of petitions,
for example.  So I think that, perhaps explaining, I think we touched
on it a little bit a while back explaining how public comments are
categorized and reviewed and processed by the working team and making
sure that process is understood might go a long way to educating
folks that that's not really an effective way to script through an
entire comment list.  Or maybe they still will.  I don't know.  But
it's just a thought that seems to me --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  You can't prevent people from doing it.

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  Seems like it's a perception that I want to look
at the list of comments and see that of the 150, 122 came from my
organization.  But, if they understood that is counting as one
comment when it came back to the working group, that -- and that that
would possibly take a lot of the enthusiasm out of that type of a
tactic.  

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Without interrupting, but -- my suggestion would
go much in the same way.  Is there a mechanism to subscribe to a
public comment that is already in the space of public comments?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN: Currently, no. But --

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  How do you mean "subscribe?"

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  I fully agree with something instead of submitting
another form.  Subscribing.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Some just say, "I agree with the comment
submitted by that person." There's no way to sign up saying "I agree."

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  If there was -- if there was -- if, technically we
provided this mechanism, probably we would have much less work to do.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  It's like a Facebook, right?  A social network, you
say, I like --

 >>MARIKA KONINGS: But it goes back to the point Jaime's made. 
Like, doesn't make a difference.  The comment should be a different
way people subscribe to it, or it's a comment and that comment will
be taken into account whether 10 people subscribe to it or 100 or --

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  The work that you people have to do, if you have
100 different but equal contributions and one subscribe 100 people,
the work to be done is different, I think.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I think --

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Other count as one, but --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  I don't think we mandate to a working group that it
counts as one.  I think we're discussing that.  A working group, for
example, could, as you said, if there are 100 entities, whether it's -
- I'm not talking about commercial, noncommercial -- entities that
support this position, that may have more weight than just one
comment. Right?  I think it's a good suggestion.  I think it may be
better for -- to provide a technical mechanism for someone to endorse
rather than submit an additional comment flooding the -- you know,
flooding the mailboxes with just an additional email that says, "I
agree."  It may be -- if there is something technological that can be
done, it would be much more efficient to do it that way.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Also, the people that assess the public comment
forum have to read 100 times the same thing.  It's kind of tiring,
you know?

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Jeff, just one other additional point, if you
don't mind, which is beyond the PDP process.  One of the things that
is really valuable in understanding the impact of public comments is
the effectiveness of outreach.  It's also understanding the
effectiveness of work that's done by global partnerships in
encouraging participation form Pete, for example.  I'll just use this
from Australia, because I can use an Australian example for me.  Did
we get any commentary from Australia about X issue?  I wonder why
not?  What have we not done to ensure that we're building the
stakeholder -- we're building an amount of participation?  So public
comment is a really good temperature gauge about what ICANN does with
respect to ensuring that it's understood outside of its own small
nucleus and microcosm of activity.  So, if you make participation
easier, and, if you -- for example, if I went to Theresa tonight --
Theresa Swinehart tonight and said, "Theresa, public comment periods
are a really great way of encouraging people from developing
communities in the Pacific to participate on the expansion of the new
top-level domain system. She then, with survey and her team, have a
way of explaining what ICANN does about showing where the
documentation is and making it simpler to participate, particularly
for people who use English as their second, third, or fourth
language.  And where, for example, their reading bandwidth of highly
technical documents is minimized because they don't operate in
English first.  And then it's translated into other languages.  So
this is a very nice way of building participation through public
comment.  It's also an interesting way of accurately reporting to the
board the effectiveness of what the GNSO does with respect to its
policy development work.  Does anyone give a rip?  Do they care about
what happens?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Let me ask from the practical level, okay?  I'm not
putting -- I'm just trying to understand.  So, if a working group has
a public comment period, what do you expect of the working group
itself to do more outreach?  Or are you saying it's not the working
group.  It's really the -- 

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  No, no, no, no. The working group is not
responsible for outreach.  It's a way for other parts of the
organization to say this work is taking place; this comment period is
coming up; this is an opportunity for to you participate in the
organization.  It's not the responsibility of the working group. 
There's corporate communications, and there's global partnerships,
and there's other people who are responsible for building
participation in the organization.  This is one lever, one practical
lever to show how that could actually take place.  And it's
relatively simple to do it.  And it's actually easily translatable,
too.  So, if you did public comment periods in languages other than
English, this is a relatively easy system on this question and
answer, take the box, click the button and do it.  It's not a big
translation task either.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Let me go to Jaime, and I do want to get to other
questions.

 >>JAIME WAGNER: Liz came with something that why 30 days is small
period.  If you have to translate and have comments and then
translate them again, okay.

That's --

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  No, that's absolutely right.  I think that was
prompting our translation discussions, which we're not addressing
today.  Or we did --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  What?  The translation?

 >>JAMES BLADEL:  Yeah.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  The overarching issue of translations, yeah.

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Sorry to bring that one up.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Again, that's one of the overarching issues that
needs to be dealt with at every single level.  What the work team had
discussed is that, once we have the basics of each of the five
stages, is then to go back and try to figure out where and how to fit
in the whole translation issue.

Because it's one that applies at all the different levels and it's --
yes, sorry.  You have a comment?

>>ALEX GAKURU:  Yes.  To what extent and to what different extent of
diverse languages can the comments be received in?  I'm asking this
because where I come from, they have Swahili and others.  So please?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  At the moment we only run public comment periods
in English.  We have done an experiment recently with one of the
public comment periods where we made the announcement available in
one of the five U.N. languages. And we also accepted comments in the
five U.N. languages.  And I hate to disappoint you, but I don't think
Swahili will quickly be added to the list of languages, I'm afraid.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Portuguese?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I think for the moment, no.  At the moment most
of the documents are restricted to the five U.N. languages, because
we have to draw the boundaries somewhere.  But this is also an issue
to be considered for the work team.  If you translate public
comments, how does it affect the timeline.  How do you go about as
well -- because, of course, all public comments that are received in
other languages will need to be translated back into English for the
working group to review, which also takes time.  So those are some of
the elements the group will need to take into account as well in the
overall timeline discussion and how it will impact.

>>ALEX GAKURU:  Could I have a follow-up question?  This raises the -
- my name is Alex Gakuru.  I'm the representative noncommercial in
Africa.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Welcome.

>>ALEX GAKURU:  Thank you, I understand this is totally open. 
That's why I'm asking.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Absolutely.  >>ALEX GOKURU:  When we look at the
various issues happening at the various working groups of ICANN, we
have had a structural exclusion in Africa because of our languages,
we can even hear even Swahili spoken by 120 million people, there's
no hope of it soon.  Now, when policies are made in various areas and
then because of participation for people on the ground missed event
because of language barrier, then, you know, a lot of decisions will
be made.  And people don't understand them.  And our participation,
especially in developing countries, has been very low in all working
groups in ICANN.  So I do not know whether there's anything that
could be done to try to address that in the meantime.  Because, if we
wait until when U.N. organizes other languages, I think we'll find
that issues dear to us will never be addressed by ICANN in a fair,
representative way.  So maybe the proposal to probably think of a way
of how you can receive more comments so that the policies that are
going to be made will be more inclusive. Thank you.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:   The suggestion might be here, because I hear
from many people that there are many online translation tools
available that provide a reasonable translation of things.  It might
be useful to include those kind of tools, free tools in public
comments so people can, actually, do those themselves, for example,
for those languages that information is not available.  That might be
a start.  Or, you know, hopefully, have organizations that are
locally active help with those kind of things and, you know, do the
outreach locally.  Because, you know, I don't think that ICANN can
take on the translation in all languages in the world at this moment.
So --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  We can move on, actually.  We'll skip a couple
questions, just so we can get through some of the topics.  Some of
these we actually may have covered just through going over -- just
went ahead.

 >>MARILYN CADE:  I just need --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  GAC's been going all day.  That's 5:00.  GNSO joint
one is 5:00.  It's only 4:15.  That's okay.  But the GAC is meeting,
if you'd rather be there.

 >>MARILYN CADE:  No, no.  I'm dying to be here, but I wanted to be
wherever you were when the GAC and GNSO met.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  So someone had raised this.  So what if -- and Liz,
actually, who might have stepped out for a sec, had raised -- said
something earlier of well, what if the working group doesn't receive
comments from an individual area?  Should something be read into
that?  How about this question here, which is:  What if you don't
receive any constituency statements, or we've had public comment
periods in the past where no one has responded.  Should anything be
read into that?  Should the working group just continue and proceed? 
Any thoughts on that?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I can just give some feedback on, you know,
previous experiences.  And often what we don't ask, of course, the
representatives on that working group is the reason for why they
haven't submitted comments and try to see if that can be addressed by
more time, which is often the case, or sometimes as well like, well,
there's no one really within our constituency that's interested in
providing input.  And I think that goes back to a bigger question
probably, if that's the answer of all constituencies to the council,
well, if no one is really interested in the issue, why did we
initiate a PDP in the first place?  

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  I don't know if this is a good measure of public
interest to have or not public comments.  I can figure many reasons
why a relevant issue can draw -- draw?  -- no attention -- lack of
time, lack of comprehension.  Not because of the issue, but because
of the people that should be interested in -- and doesn't understand.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Jump ahead, getting towards the end.  And,
actually, we just talked about this.

 >>KIEREN MC CARTHY:  Can I be rude and answer that?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Sure.  That's not being rude.  That's participation.

 >>KIEREN MC CARTHY:  My name is Kieren McCarthy.  I'm ICANN's
general manager of public participation.  I've been looking at the
public comment process for ages.  And my thinking is that we could
set up a very simple mechanism by which you -- about a week before
something closes, you send it out to a specific person in each area,
each group, GNSO, ALAC, et cetera, et cetera saying, "Are you aware
this closes in a week?"   And, when it closes, you could easily have
an online forum saying, "We noticed that you didn't respond.  Why was
this?"  And give a series of very simple explanations.  We weren't
aware of it.  We were happy with it.  We want to withhold our
comments until a later date.  Something like that, so that then
people are aware.  Because quite a few times we have public comment
periods, and people aren't aware it happened.  So a very simple
mechanism, which at least prods people to explain why they didn't put
in a comment might cause people to put in comments.  But, in terms of
your question, I think it's -- the problem is not that we're -- often
that we don't get comments.  It's the fact that we don't register the
fact that people were aware of it and didn't respond.  We should
always say -- everyone should always be saying, "Yes, we didn't
respond."  And that's fine.  As long as you were aware that we were
having that public comment period.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I mean, just one point of clarification.  I
think this question -- I mean, they are very valid points that you
made.  But I think it was specifically targeted as well at
constituency stakeholder statements, where those are the ones that
you would think -- you know, they've raised the issue and initiated
the PDP.  And, if there's no input received, it makes it difficult
for the working group to do their work.  Public comment is a very
good approach as well and for someone to see the key stakeholder
groups why they didn't provide that input.  And similar approach
might be used here and sending them a form saying, "Look, why didn't
you provide input?  You happy to let the rest decide what should be
done in this area?  You don't have time?  You need more time?"  Or I
think a similar approach could be used there.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Thanks, Kieren.  The next page of issues actually
relates to the translation, which we started talking about.  But I
think we talked about those questions.  Let's go to the -- let's see.
Actually, one of the questions that we talked about was which parts
of documents should be translated, or is it feasible to translate? 
Obviously, the ideal utopian answer would be we'd love to be able to
translate every document in its entirety into every language.  Some
groups have recommended, well, at least get the executive summaries
in the five U.N. languages or more, if possible.

But, again, when you submit those in the languages, then you have to
receive them or have a mechanism to receive them.  So I'm seeing
James --

 >>JAMES BLADEL: Yeah.  I'm going to -- I'm just going to be a
little difficult, because it's getting late.  But I was going to say
answer that with a question of which part of a document would you
rather not read?  I mean, I'm looking at it from the perspective of
I'm an English speaker, and I speak English.  And I could imagine if
someone took away certain sections of a document whether it was a
charter, a final report, an issues report or something like that, it
would be a significant diminishment of the value of the document
itself.  So I see where you're going, and I think that we need to
have some boundaries on translation.  But I think, if you're going to
subject a document to a translation, it should be in its entirety.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Liz?

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  I want to go back to a "what's the purpose"
question.  So we all think -- as a mother of three children plus the
stepmother of another one, we all think children are a great idea. 
So you can't argue about motherhood, because we think it's fun. 
Translation is like motherhood.  It's a really good idea, and it
ought to be done.  Then you go to a purpose question.  And you say
what is the purpose of translation and when is it the most effective
to do?  And I like James's point about you want the whole darn thing
done.  And then you have to link that with is this feasible in an
organization with a budget of X size?

So what additional value do we extract by translating?  

So, for me, I think you need to translate the whole thing of
significant pieces of documentation at particular points.  How you
deal with responses to the translated materials is actually quite
tricky.  So, for me, the issues report, the PDP initiation report,
the final report, are really important.  But it has to be an on-
balance question that says where do we get the most value?  And
perhaps it's a question one asks at the beginning of the process,
which says, is our working group going to benefit from -- let's say
it's Jaime.  And is your second language Spanish, first language
Portuguese?  And second is.?

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Second English and Spanish.

 >>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Okay.  So, if Jamie was in my working group and I
was the chair of a working group and I whiz around the table and I
said for you perhaps it's French, maybe?  More comfortable.  If you
can't have it in English, then you would choose.  And then you would
start to stream, based on the participation of the working group.  Do
you have to participate everything into every of the five languages
for each thing?  Probably not.  These are working documents for
working people to do working things with.  So you can slim down the --
because it's a time constraint that's the terrible part of the
translation that it takes time to go backwards and forwards to get
them translated accurately.  There's no point in doing it, if the
translation is not absolutely accurate.  So just a couple ideas about
maybe the working group can take control of that themselves by an
early poll.  What would the working group find most useful?  Then the
broader discussion is: What's the purpose of translation?  And where
do you get better value in responses, if we have translated
documents?  And then what do you translate at the board level?  Do
you translate the final resolutions because the board members have a
requirement for reading languages?  If I just whiz quickly around the
board, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, any one of the Indian
languages.  What's most comfortable?  You don't do those.  You only
do -- the options are the five U.N. languages, because that's the
limitation at the moment.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Sorry, Jaime.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  I had a question to Marika.  You said that there
was one experience with public comment with -- in the five languages.
And these public comments were submitted and the five languages, yes?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yes.  But, to add to that, we actually didn't
receive any public comments in other languages than English.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  Oh, yeah?  None?

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  I do have to admit it wasn't the sexy topic like
new gTLDs or things like that.  It was inter-registrar transfer
policies.  So that might have garnered less interest.  But still we
didn't -- it was well on purpose to do it small and not immediately
get overwhelmed.  But we did make a lot of effort as well going to a
region or global partnerships team to say, "Here's, please, a link." 
We sent announcements in different languages as well to the different
mailing lists.  So it was a little bit disappointing that we didn't
get any, not even someone saying, "Great, you've translated and
you've run a public comment period in different languages."

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  You got overwhelmed, but the other way around, yeah.

 >>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yeah.

 >>JAIME WAGNER:  I think it's not the valid experiment, you know? 
Because I think there are many issues around ICANN work that could
interest Africa or South America.  And, well, one of the reasons they
are not aware is the language barrier.  There are other reasons that
should be considered.  But I think this is our work as
representatives of these parts, too, to spread the word there and
here, you know?  To say well, we must include these people in these
discussions.  Because this will enrich the discussion.  This will not
add time only.  This will add -- how I say -- density?  It will add
purpose.  Okay?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:  Let me go to James and then Kieren.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Just in response to some of the things I think
Jaime and Liz were saying earlier, the first item is I know, Marika,
when we joined a new working group, one of the first orders of
business is we send out a Doodle and ask everybody what days and
dates they have free to conduct weekly or biweekly teleconferences. 
It seems like it would be a very simple process to also ask and
survey the language composition of the working group at that time and
if not to -- if nothing else, you can identify when there is a
language -- is a barrier, as a barrier to participation but also, you
know, if it's not, well, it is a courtesy.  You may be comfortable
participating in working group in English, but it's at least a
courtesy to non-English speakers.

And to Liz's point, I think it is probably a good idea to draw a
distinction between those documents that were meant for consumption
within the working group and perhaps the different stakeholders and
constituencies versus those that are meant to go out to a broader
community.

I think you are absolutely right when some of those that you listed
probably don't benefit from translation and it doesn't make a lot of
sense to -- you know, you can't necessarily tie translation of a PDP
charter to increased participation in a working group.  If they're
there and they want to participate, they will.

But when you submit interim reports, final reports, public comments,
things from the broader community, I think those are the things that
could benefit from translation.  But when you translate something,
going back to the first thing, it should be the whole thing.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Marika.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Just a comment on what James said.  At least in
the policy team we have been looking mainly at the translation issue
more on the big outcomes that can be -- go out to the wider community
and how to enhance participation from that perspective, less from the
view of working group participants and what languages they speak as
well with the assumption that if you participate in a working group
as we're conducting business in English in the GNSO, I don't know how
much difference it makes just having some documents for them
translated while all e-mails and all conference calls and all that
will be done in English.  So that's something to take into
consideration.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Is the other group looking at this issue at all, or
have they drawn a box around it and said this is our problem
essentially?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  The other group has just in their document on
working group guidelines, general ICANN guidelines on translation,
but no further -- they were relying on the PDP work team to define
what specific for the PDP process should be done in regard to
translation.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  Let me go to Kieren.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  I wanted to bring your attention to something
that the board will probably approve on Friday which has been called
the Document Publication Operational Policy which adds a bit of meat
to the document deadline agreement, which is the 15 days before a
meeting which has mostly worked the last two meetings.  

That policy covers various bits around documents.  And included in
that is two things.  One is that all of the major documents that
ICANN produces should have an executive summary and there are
suggestions for what you put in an executive summary.  

And then in a meeting yesterday, the board public participation
committee -- we ran a public comment process on it and we ran a
public session on it.  And one of the strong bits of feedback we got
was the executive summaries should be translated because it allows
very quick, easy access to what are these documents.

So it's going to be in the policy all executive summaries should be
translated into the five U.N. languages.  And the rationale -- I see
you chewing around questions I have been working on, that the board
has been working on for a long while, the rationale is you can't just
do a one-off and expect people to turn up.  You can't say, Well,
we're doing this and now we've done it in Spanish and I sent it to a
Spanish mailing list and no one popped up.  It doesn't work like that.

The idea is if you are consistent over time, people will start
getting used to it.  So you can always translate executive summaries
so people will always be able to know what is going on, and then
there should be a mechanism which we haven't figured out yet so that
someone can request saying, We've all read lots of the executive
summaries.  We would like to read the rest of the document, and then
you have a request issue for that document.  That way you deal with
the demand and what can be very expensive translation if you
translate everything.  So that will become a board policy hopefully
on Friday.

And I hope that has implications.  You know, if it works well and
people like it, then I'd recommend the other people in the community
follow that sort of approach.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  One question for Kieren.  Does it only apply for,
like, ICANN documents?  Does it also apply to all documents made by
SOs and ACs?

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  It's purposefully ambiguous because the board
didn't want to say, "By the way, community, we are going to make you
do this" because it is just not a good idea.  So the idea is to put
the policy out there and say, We've thought about it and hopefully it
will act as a sort of best practice and everyone will say, It was so
useful to have these executive summaries, it was so useful to have
them translated, we should do that as well, the sort of ICANN way of
approaching it.  If it works, then hopefully others would adopt it.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  I would like to endorse fully this proposition
because let me just give you a sense of how useful this would be for
me.  If I received -- well, Portuguese wouldn't be one of the five
languages.  But if I want to engage the ISP community of Brazil in
some discussion that pertains to their interest and many of them are
not English speakers, so it would be helpful to have executive
summaries in Portuguese in order to just send forward to my mail
lists that cover all the ISP associations in Brazil.

And this would probably have some -- not end up with no comments,
you know?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Okay.  I just want to close out the meeting with a
quick discussion on a proposed face-to-face meeting of this group --

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  I will update the questions.  I guess, we
discussed some of those and get the link out and probably give people
two weeks or something to fill in and, you know, it is really
important that you provide your feedback there because that
information will also be incorporated in the report and the basis for
development of the recommendations.  So please fill it in.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So we are going to send around that survey.  Thank
you, Marika.

As far as a face-to-face, the thinking is -- why don't you go into
the thinking from ICANN staff and what you have to prepare to get it
approved.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Yeah.  So we already had a discussion, I think,
on our last call on the organization of a face-to-face meeting as a
way to come to conclusion on some of the recommendations on these
different stages, as a way as well to speed up the process and really
force a focus on these issues so we can come to a wrap-up of this
working group.

So we have -- we discussed to have a face-to-face meeting which
would then have very clear deliverables and output.  I think we need
to put together a very clear work program so that there is a clear
expectation of what this meeting will lead to.

As we also discussed, ICANN is willing to make available meeting
support for this such a face-to-face meeting.  But in order to get
that support, we'll need that clear work plan, deliverables and also
a list of representatives from each constituency stakeholder group
that would come to that meeting so we can make an assessment as well
what would be the most convenient and cost-effective location to hold
such a meeting.

So I think we need two things from this group.  I think one is for
each constituency or stakeholder group to elect or select one
representative that would receive meeting funding.  Of course, anyone
else that wants to participate is more than able to come.  We will,
of course, make available remote participation for the meeting.

And second part would be finding a meeting date, and I think for
that we would probably send around a Doodle.  

We had some discussions and I think we are looking at all our
activities that are going on and the workload at early January, early
half January, depending on people's availability.

So I think that's --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So, Marilyn, yes?

>>MARILYN CADE:  Marika, something you said I don't understand but
maybe it would be just a clarification, if I can use that phrase
sitting at the table.  The point that the stakeholder groups would
need to tell us who, are you suggesting that it's not the members of
the group who would be participating?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  No.  I was more thinking of some stakeholder
groups or constituencies have one or more representatives on the
group.  Sorry, I should have clarified that.  The idea is, of course,
those that are participating in the work team but for those that have
more representatives that they make a decision on which person they
would like to have travel funding to attend that meeting.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  Jeff, sorry for the dumb question.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Sure.

>>LIZ WILLIAMS:  What's the end date of this?  Because that tells
you working backwards what you need to achieve by what date.  So what
is your proposal?  I'm sorry I'm asking you a stupid logistical
question.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  No.  There has been no end date set for us.  We are
just trying to get to the final work product quicker than it might
otherwise get.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  Looking at the time we've taken to get where we
are now, if you look at the tick boxes chart, we are only halfway.  I
think how much -- when did this working group form?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Earlier this year.

>>JAIME WAGNER:  It was in Mexico, I think.

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  So that's already quite some time ago.  If we
look at how much more time it would take us probably to get to the
end if we would continue on weekly or biweekly conference calls --
And we've had to cancel some calls as well due to lack of
participation.  Looking at the workload that's coming, for example,
on the STI working group, that will also take up some resources.  We
really would hope that forcing people into a room for two days and,
you know, coming to some conclusions and consensus on recommendations
-- because I think on most of the elements, we have a lot of notes, a
lot of discussion points.

But on the actual recommendations which, you know, we did already do
a first report on stage 1 with recommendations which no one commented
on, no one provided any input on.  A second one is about to come out,
and I'm not really sure how much time people have to review those. 
So I think it's really -- the goal of the objective would be to
really come to conclusion on the specific recommendations on each
stage, the overall process, the timeline and also which changes
should be made to the bylaws.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  So, Robin?

>>ROBIN GROSS:  I might not have heard the answer.  You may have
given it already.  What was the time frame for this meeting -- this
face-to-face meeting that you were talking about?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  We would probably be looking at early January,
half January.  So the idea would be to get out a Doodle and see what
would work best for everyone.  I mean, looking at the composition of
the work team and, you know, the members that have been most active,
I think probably the outcome would be a meeting somewhere East Coast
U.S. probably.  But, again, we'll need to assess depending on how
will get funded and where we can get the best meeting location that's
the most cost effective.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  And the East Coast is wonderful in the middle of
winter.

[Laughter]

>>ROBIN GROSS:  You are welcome to come to California.

>> Hear hear.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Jeff, this means we would be more motivated to stay
inside and work.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Exactly.  We have to trap everybody inside the room.
We are also being realistic that we see the next few weeks of losing
time.  Even if we try to have conference calls, we know that people
will be bogged down with responding to the guidebook, with responding
to the board letter, responding to everything else.  There is a bunch
of other comment periods that have been extended to the end of
November or around there.  

So just being realistic, we think a face-to-face will help make up
some time that we might otherwise lose especially with end-of-year
holidays that come up and vacations.  All of that kind of weighs into
the mix.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  Just -- is the other group discussing this as well?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  They are almost done.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  They're done.

>>JAMES BLADEL:  They're done because they kicked so much work over
the fence.

[Laughter]

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Their group was very -- has had a very --

>>JAMES BLADEL:  This is transcribed so I don't want to say too much.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  Their group has a very narrow focus.  I think ours
covers much more breadth of areas.  But they have a good work product
and have had -- I look forward to seeing their stuff.

Anybody else?  Questions?  Comments?

>>MARIKA KONINGS:  I will just send out a note on the work team
mailing list, especially as well for those that are not here,
outlining what we discussed on the face-to-face meeting and what I
would need from everyone in order to move this forward and get
internal approval to organize such a meeting.  So that should be
forthcoming shortly.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:  All right, thank you, everybody.

[Applause]