[CCWG-ACCT] Accountability - the "Future Governance Review"

[Malcolm Hutty]

On 06/10/2015 16:54, Aikman-Scalese, Anne wrote:
> After last night’s call, there appears to be a push toward committing
> this Group’s resources to evaluation of the “Future Governance Review” 
> approach as a possible “way forward” in the face of the Board’s apparent
> veto of the CCWG proposal.  The Board has expressed concern that the SOs
> and ACs are “not sufficiently representative” of stakeholders and
> therefore not sufficiently accountable to assume Sole Member or
> Designator powers.  The irony in this situation is that to my knowledge,
> this “Future Governance Review” notion has not been reviewed with the
> CSG or any other SOs and ACs.

Thanks to Steve Del Bianco and others for showing me where his proposal
is found.

Kicking the can down the road can be helpful if you think that later on
it may be easier to resolve a difficult point, once some current
obstacle to agreement has been removed.

If we kick this particular can down the road, past transition, what
reason is there to think that it will be easier resolve in the future?

I can think of some reasons why it might actually be harder.

Without transition, the community will have even less leverage over the
Board than it does now. Why would we expect the Board to be any more
tractable in the future?

The Board has very helpfully given us advance notice of the next
argument it will use against membership: membership cannot be
countenanced because SOs and ACs until the SOs and ACs “not sufficiently
representative” of stakeholders, and so cannot be trusted. This seems
like an evergreen argument: no matter what, they can always claim that
SOs and ACs have not reached that perfect, magical state where they
would be prepared to yield up some portion of their authority to them.

This, ironically, is coming from a Board that derives its own legitimacy
from appointment by those very same SOACs.

Finally, absent the imperative to reach agreement in time to achieve
transition we might find it harder to build a consensus even among
ourselves.

So with such problems, it doesn't immediately strike me as likely to
lead to success. What are the arguments in favour of this approach,
other than the allure of procrastination?

Malcolm.

-- 
            Malcolm Hutty | tel: +44 20 7645 3523
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