[council] Regarding time of the Board with the community

[Bruce Tonkin]

Hello All,

On the topic of time the board spends on its own versus with the community.

Generally on the weekend we do work within Board  committees, and some work as a Board workshop.  The workload in these committees/workshops has increased quite a bit in recent years - e.g work reviewing the ATRT 2 recommendations, work on reviewing the budget, work on reconsideration requests, work on responding to GAC advice etc.

We try to get much of this done at Board retreats etc - but to be timely we also spend the weekend on it at the ICANN public meetings.

During the week we mostly attend meetings with the various stakeholders at ICANN - GAC, ALAC, GNSO, RSSAC, SSAC, etc., and we attend the public sessions on Monday.

We do take some time on Wednesday afternoon to prepare for the Board meeting and public forum on Thursday.    We used to work into the night during the week - often 2 or 3am in the morning - which tends to lead to bad decisions.      Now we don't tend to work in the evenings - and make an effort to attend the various social functions to interact with the community.

So we have probably moved to get a bit more work done during the day  and interact a bit more with the community in the evenings.

It would perhaps be helpful to think whether we can better use the time we do allocate to the GNSO.  Currently it is most of Tuesday and an hour on Sunday - as a whole Board, and Bill Graham and I also attend additional meetings with Stakeholder groups.   

I have been feeling for some time that there is a lot of repetition between these forums - particularly on Tuesday - so maybe we could think of better ways of structuring that day - especially to get substantive input on the content of proposed policies and procedures.

Apart from some discussion of IDNs - I don't think we discussed any actual content today for example. 


Regards,
Bruce Tonkin