[ST-WP] Spurring Board Action

[Jonathan Zuck]

Greetings!

On the call this morning, we had a discussion of some stress tests that risk falling through the cracks. Cheryl asked me to briefly summarize the portion of the discussion dealing with stress tests which involved board inaction. You might recall that Alan Greenberg originally brought up the notion of "compelling the board to take action" and there are several of the existing stress tests that highlight the need for that capability on the part of the community. Specifically,


ST 11: "force ICANN to implement a recommendation arising from an AOC review, namely SSR"

ST 17:  "force ICANN to respond to recommendations from advisory committees such as SSAC."


ST 3,4, 20, 22:  "force ICANN to implement a consensus policy or recommendation of an AoC review"


Cheryl brought up the fact that 11 and 17 had piqued the interest of the CWG so we focused on those two. Stress test 11 was inspired by the recent breach at ICANN and the inability of the community to extract information about the breach. Without the ability to spur action, that stress test would fail.


Stress test 17 was about recommendations that are ignored by the board. One example we have used for some time is on the issue of Name Collisions and certs where a fairly large outcry on the part of the community was required to spur action a year ago. Another example, near and dear to the ALAC is dotless domains where there was very specific advice from SSAC as well as consensus concern and the board was slow to respond.


Avri brought up recommendation 9 of the ATRT with respect to advice which dictates the board respond to advice in a timely manner:


9.1. ICANN Bylaws Article XI should be amended to include the following language to mandate Board Response to Advisory Committee Formal Advice:

The ICANN Board will respond in a timely manner to formal advice from all Advisory Committees, explaining what action it took and the rationale for doing so.


The question then arose whether a board "response" would be sufficient to trigger the other review mechanisms currently under consideration  by WP2 so it was resolved to discuss that with Becky and her team. Perhaps it would be enough to dictate that the trigger mechanism for a review is a decision or response from the board. If not, we might need revisit a specific community power to induce the board to vote on a recommendation so that the vote can act as a trigger for further review if necessary.


Cheryl, I hope I have sufficiently stressed everyone out with the possibility of board inaction. Feel free to ask questions or raise issues I have forgotten. I'll clip the mp3 for the topic if that's helpful to folks.

Jonathan


Jonathan Zuck
President
202-331-2130 X 101 | jzuck at actonline.org<mailto:jzuck at actonline.org> | Skype: jvzuck

ACT | The App Association
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