[Gnso-newgtld-wg] Working Group Status and Next Steps

[Jeff Neuman]

Dear All Working Group Members/Observers & Work Tracks 1-4 Members/Observers,

You may have noticed that in the last day or so notes have been sent out cancelling certain Work Track and overall Working Group meetings.  We wanted to provide the group with an explanation and information on where we are going from here.

Over the past year we have been broken out into Work Tracks to get through the voluminous amount of issues (both policy and some implementation) from the 2012 round of new gTLDs.  Although there may be a couple of work track meetings over the next month to cover areas that we may not have covered (or may not have covered as in depth as we wanted), during the month of April, we will mostly operate as a full working group to get out an Initial Report.

ICANN staff and the Working Group Leaders (including Work Track 1-4 Leaders) are working on taking all of the materials and combining it into one Initial Report.  This not only means taking all of the power points and working documents and turning those into prose, but also organizing the report in a manner that flows.  As we discussed prior to, and at, ICANN 61, our goal is to organize the Initial Report in more of a chronological order starting with the Overarching Issues, Pre-Application Activities, Application Activities, Objections/public comment, Evaluation, Pre-delegation and Post Delegation.  The goal is to have a draft of the substantive elements out to the full working group by the end of the first week of April (some of the more boilerplate oriented language may be filled in subsequently).  This will give the full working group at least 3 weeks to review before the target date for publishing the Initial Report for public comment.

This will require that we really use e-mail for our comments and also that we will be scheduling 90 minute overall working group calls on April 9th, April 16th, and April 23rd.

As a reminder, the Initial Report will be set up in such a way as to describe the issues, provide preliminary recommendations (if we have them), and to present options for possible paths forward.   In addition, we will be attempting to provide pointed questions on where we would really like to see public comment.  We are NOT going to be issuing Consensus Calls for the recommendations or the content.  Rather, we are going to try and have general agreement that the Initial Report is ready to go out for public comment.  We will be very clear in the introduction to the report that we have not done consensus calls and the purposes for which we are presenting preliminary recommendations.  We will be doing consensus calls for the final report later this year

This does not apply for Work Track 5.  Work Track 5 is on a different schedule which will be communicated by the 4 Work Track 5 leaders.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Best regards,

Jeffrey J. Neuman and Cheryl Langdon-Orr
Subsequent Procedures PDP Overall Chairs


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