[council] Main points from our Council wrap-up

[Stéphane Van Gelder]

Here's a quick list of the main discussions points from today. Once again, thanks for some great discussions during this wrap-up which as usual has proved extremely useful.

Again, great to have spent a week working with you guys. See you all soon. My heartfelt thanks to Mary and Jeff for their support. Sorry I had to leave early.

Stéphane




Agenda for Singapore. Mary has volunteered to work on this. Thanks to Olga for working on the SFO agenda.

New weekend session to work through the motions. Worked well here, support for continuing this.

Social dinner. Make it more casual in terms of venue, not too expensive. Very valuable to have that informal time together.

Prioritization. Informal discussion on what the priorities are for the Council.

Workload for councillors. The environment itself is very challenging to learn and to work in. Is an executive summary a good idea?

Open Council meeting. Don't schedule against other GNSO activities. The afternoon format is much better than the morning format.

Newcomers. Helping people to understand what the Council is doing. Currently it's very hard for people to understand what's happening. We need to find some way to make the Council's work more accessible. Staff run a policy update webinar prior to a meeting that might help. Is a 2-page primer useful? We used to have those before...

Weekend sessions. The time was used efficiently w/o the usual repeat of presentations that we normally have, so that may explain why the sessions seemed so useful this time. So let's keep the presentations during the weekend sessions streamlined.

Presentations. Make copies of the presentation available before the meetings.

Guidance. Website updates could help to find documents more easily. Having a brief handout in the room where our sessions are happening to help people know where to find the resource documents they need to better understand our work.

Meeting schedule. Officially make the meeting start on the weekend on the main schedule.

Staff and resource issues. Do we understand what staff being designated to the GNSO means? Is the staff assigned to the GNSO being captured by other groups? Should the Council submit a budget request for new policy staff? If so, will someone take the lead on Council budget requests? Deadline is April 4 so very tight.