[council] Voting to go counter to previous policy was Re: [] Re: Letter ....

[Alan Greenberg]

That is why I originally raised the question of what voting threshold 
would we use.

Marika was correct in that the current rules do not mention this kind 
of vote. Not surprising because we have never really had this kind of 
vote before and we did not contemplate such a possibility when 
drafting the rules on thresholds (for those not present, translating 
the old Council thresholds to those for a bicameral Council involved 
a LOT of thought and some vigorous debate, but this particular 
question was just not considered).

I do not believe that it is really important in the current case. The 
original New gTLD Policy was not a Consensus Policy (ie altering 
existing contracts) and so did not require a super-majority to have 
the force of law.

However, if we were to do another such "change" to policy, and that 
policy was a Consensus Policy, I strongly believe that a 
super-majority should be required to alter it, and the rules (and in 
fact the Bylaws) should be changed to reflect this.

Alan

At 16/05/2014 09:47 AM, Avri Doria wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Change subject.
>
>This discussion has gotten me thinking about the future and the whole
>notion of voting to accept a deviation from PDP policy recommendations.
>  I know we said it wasn't a precedent, but having done it once, there is
>no reason to expect that it can't happen again, unless we make a rule
>against it, which I do not expect us to do.
>
>In retrospect it seems odd to me that a PDP policy that was approved by
>a super-majority, could be exempted by a majority.   Is this a voting
>practice we wish to endorse for the future?
>
>Perhaps this is an issue that should be discussed futher and might even
>be an issue for the SCI to chew on for a spell.  As this practice of the
>Board checking back with us becomes regularized, something I hope
>continues, we need to refine our processes to work with this.  We are
>already working on ideas for accelerating non-PDP working group process
>in several groups. We might also need to look at the voting thresholds
>for such motions.
>
>avri