[council] Improvements to f2f GNSO meeting planning?

[Heather Forrest]

Dear Council colleagues,

With the meeting request notice having been sent round to the leaders of Cs and SGs recently, I'm wondering if now is an opportune time to raise some concerns raised by both Houses about the process of developing the GNSO meeting schedule.

The two main concerns I've heard are that 1) the decision-making process of which GNSO meetings get onto the ICANN schedule isn't very transparent and 2) there isn't a clear rationale for this task falling to the Council Vice Chairs, given the limited remit of Council under the Bylaws. I'd have to say I agree with both.

My understanding is that some years ago, there was a community volunteer-populated "meetings committee", but that this died a slow death as it met infrequently, was too large to be effective, and struggled to meet difficult deadlines. It faded into nothingness, and our GNSO support staff took up the task. When concerns were raised about staff making the scheduling decisions, staff brought the Vice Chairs into the process.

I don't think we can fully alleviate these concerns prior to Hyderabad, but we can try to shift our practices to introduce an opportunity for input from the broader GNSO community. What I'm thinking is that if SGs and Cs are willing and able to get their meeting requests in a few days earlier than the 12 Sept deadline (say, one week after the upcoming Council meeting, so Sept. 8th) then the Vice Chairs (sorry, Donna, I'm volunteering us for speedy action) could ASAP assess requests and circulate a list showing the outcome of that assessment to the GNSO community (via SG/C chairs or Councillors, whichever seems most efficient/suitable) for comment/input before the request list gets submitted to the ICANN scheduling team.

SGs and Cs who aren't able to get their requests in early won't benefit from this simply because we're to short on time for this meeting, and even the turnaround for comment on those that are submitted in time won't be generous. That said, this could be an experiment, and if we start Copenhagen planning immediately with this kind of process, I hope we can achieve the twin goals of getting the community involved and meeting our scheduling deadlines with a workable schedule as an outcome. In short, Council Vice Chairs would still be involved, but in more of an administrative capacity, with community input into the decision-making.

I've put this out on the list in advance of our upcoming meeting to give time to think about the idea in advance. Hyderabad planning will be an item on our upcoming agenda, and this could factor into that discussion.

Best wishes,

Heather


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