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

[Salaets, Ken]

Sensible questions, Malcolm.  

kjs

-----Original Message-----
From: accountability-cross-community-bounces at icann.org [mailto:accountability-cross-community-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Malcolm Hutty
Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2015 1:03 PM
To: Aikman-Scalese, Anne; accountability-cross-community at icann.org
Subject: Re: [CCWG-ACCT] Accountability - the "Future Governance Review"


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.

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