[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Message from Chuck in Advance of 16 Feb RDS PDP WG Meeting

[Gomes, Chuck]

I want to express my thanks for the support expressed of my involvement in the RDS PDP WG leadership team.  I sincerely look forward to working together with David, Michele and Susan as a team in leading the WG and want to emphasize that our goal will be to facilitate effective bottom-up processes that allow contributions from all interested and affected stakeholders.   While we will do our best to ensure that the WG functions fairly and productively, it is important to recognize that the success of our efforts will be dependent on the contributions of all WG members so we can only succeed with the contributions of all of you.

I would be naïve to suggest that our work will be easy.  15 years of ICANN Whois policy work has demonstrated that our work will be very challenging.  Only with the input of all members can we hope to adequately deal with all of the issues that need to be considered.  So I encourage everyone to help us identify issues. In doing so, we will have lots of different views.  We need to first respectfully listen to all of the input from our fellow WG members.  Then we will need to collaborate with one another constructively to try to reach consensus on recommendations that fulfill our charter responsibilities.

As we start digging into our actual work, it is essential that we understand the WG charter that has been approved by the GNSO Council.  In that regard, I would like to share some of my personal observations about the charter and encourage discussion in the days ahead about my observations.  I would appreciate feedback from any of you including questions you may have.

My observations are organized below into three sections, A, B & C.


A.      The charter divides our work into three phases.

·         It is important that we all have a clear understanding of what is contained in each of the phases but our emphasis for the immediate tasks before us needs to be on Phase 1.

·         As we fulfill our responsibilities for Phase 1, I think it is very important to realize that the actual development of policies will happen in Phase 2.

·         I predict that all of us may want to jump ahead and start doing policy development in Phase 1 but I ask everyone to refrain from that except to the extent that our Phase 1 tasks may require high level consideration of policy issues.

·         As I understand the charter, Phase 1 has the following primary tasks:

§  Define requirements for registration data services, regardless of the system used to deliver them

§  Decide whether a new RDS is needed and, if so, why; or if not, how would existing Whois need to be modified.


B.      The charter organizes our work into eleven (11) questions that apply to each of the three phases.

·         After showing some of our administrative startup tasks, the Mind Map divides the questions as follows:
1.1  What are the fundamental requirements of gTLD registration? (Questions 1-5)
1.2  Is a new policy framework and next-generation RDS needed to address these requirements?

·         After developing requirements in response to questions 1-5, the WG needs to answer this question.

§  If yes, what cross-cutting requirements must a next-generation RDS address? (Questions 6-11)

§  If no, does the current Whois policy framework sufficiently address the requirements from questions 1-5?

o   If not, what revisions are recommended to the current Whois policy framework to do so?

·         I believe the bulk of the work plan the WG needs to develop is outlined at a high level by the above from the Mind Map.

·         Note that each of the 11 areas is defined further in the Issue Report so it will be useful for all of us to be familiar with that report.


C.      One of the first tasks the WG has is to develop a Work Plan.

·         I believe that the charter elements in A & B above provide a clear outline for our Work Plan.  The big job we will have in developing a Work Plan will be to fill in the details of that outline, i.e., a systematic approach for effectively defining requirements for a RDS and answering questions related to those requirements.

·         The leadership team has committed to taking a first cut of a draft work plan in the next week or so.

o   That draft will be presented to the full WG for comment and discussion.

o   One of the hardest things we will have to do is to estimate time lines but, before we do that, it will be necessary to agree on the details of the approach we will use.

In our meeting tomorrow we will briefly discuss my thoughts above before we continue our discussion of the Mind Map.  If possible please review the Mind Map before our meeting as well as my comments above.

Thanks,

Chuck
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