[CPWG] About Single Subject Meetings

[Evan Leibovitch]

I'm not in much of a position to comment because my attendance record on
calls is not good. They tend to happen when I'm doing day-job things, and I
much prefer to participate through written media where I can participate on
my own time, and take the time to put out (what I hope appear as) cogent
thoughts may actually take some time to develop and express. The
environment of a real-time call is not conductive to that. Frankly,
Jonathan, I'm not sure there are too many more efficiencies to be extracted
from calls in their corrent form.

Christopher's proposal IMO is reasonable but not possible the way things
are being done now. They *would* be possible if a monthly CPWG call -- held
a few days before each ALAC meeting -- was limited to decision-making
through consensus assessment on what would be the WG's position(s) to take
to ALAC. In advance of each call the discussion would take place on Slack/
Loomio/ whatever using channels for each topic where the possible options
are developed..

That there's too much for a single monthly call is not the result of
inefficiency. It's the product of chasing too many things. As long as I've
been involved in these processes I've been dismayed at the perceived need
to comment on so many GNSO and other comment solicitations that really
ought to be either too detailed or not relevant enough for our
consideration.

When forcing ourselves to look at every issue thrust at us through the lens
of the *non-registrant end user* (registrants already have their voice
elsewhere in ICANN), the landscape of relevant issues shrinks dramatically.
Why should we care about:

   - Who administers auction proceeds: we may have something high-level to
   say about how proceeds should be spent, but does the end users really give
   a damn who runs it?

   - Further gTLD rounds: Rather than actually take a position on whether
   having more rounds is actually better for end-users at at a high-level, we
   get way too deep into legalese of the Applicant Guidebook. We should be
   limiting ourselves to issues that affect end users such as stability, abuse
   and confusion and leave the industry fight over the rest of it.

   - Community evaluation and applicant support. I once was very heavily
   involved in both, but on reflection see that these are very much issues for
   would-be registries and not end-users. Our interest is indirect at best.
   The applicants are wannabe registry operators who ultimately want to sell
   domains. It's of marginal interest to end users whether specialized TLDs
   exist or not because we're not buying domains, just linking to them. The
   public already knows that domains don't always exact-mactch to the names of
   the registrants so why are we chasing issues of interest to registries?

Sure, there's are those among us to whom industry issues such as community
TLDs are a big deal. But they're a big deal to registries and registrants
and maybe registrars, not end users. There are other ICANN constituencies
that exist to advance positions from the PoV of registrants, both
commercial and noncommercial, advocates are welcome to use those paths.

My main point is that if we're overloaded because we're chasing too many
issues, they fault is one of judgment not efficiency. There should be a
very severe triage going on for every public comment, event demand of our
time that comes by. We spend too much time running after public comment
periods rather than choosing for ourselves what issues matter and being
proactive. This problem has existed for a long time, the solution has
always been in plain sight. Be more detailed and thoughtful about fewer
things, and stick to issues that directly impact end users. Every single
issue that comes our way should be answered with "I'm an end user who
doesn't buy domains. How does this impact me?"

Heidi, ICANN does ALAC a massive disservice -- indeed it prevents out
execution of our mandate -- by measuring success based on volume of
statements. Whether or not that's the case now, it certainly was in the
past. In this respect ALAC needs to be a little more GAC-like by choosing
fewer things to talk about but having more and weightier things to say
about those that we choose to address. We will ALWAYS be overloaded beyond
capacity until this is done, and using new tech tools will not solve THAT
problem.

- Evan
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