[council] Council restructuring

[Philip Sheppard]

As agreed on yesterday's call here is a proposed response to the ICANN Board for its Dec 11
meeting regarding progress.
Philip
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The GNSO is pleased to report it is making substantial progress on GNSO reform issues.
This progress is manifest at the Constituency level from both existing and in-formation
constituencies who are working on the required changes.
At the level of Council a structure has been adopted with two steering groups and underlying
work teams to deal with the key operational and policy changes (reference).

Staff have prepared a preliminary checklist of activities (attached) that is under
discussion in Council with a view to adopting this checklist with the following changes:
a) prioritisation
b) Interim transitional changes necessary to meet the June 2009 deadline to put in place an
interim functional Council
c) longer term changes necessary to fully implement the required reform.

The Council will follow certain principles in this process:
1. Leadership elections will be de novo based on the enfranchised new interim body
2. Full outreach and bottom up discussion at each stage of transition.

Timetable
At present Council believes the June 2009 deadline is achievable but that will be ultimately
determined by the cooperation and capacity of the GNSO's underlying volunteer bodies as well
as staff resources. Council will inform the Board in due course if it believes there will be
any slippage in this aspiration.