[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] RDS PDP WG Leadership

[Gomes, Chuck]

Alan,

I see no problem with leaders being associated with strong views as long as they do not let their strong views impact their ability to lead neutrally.  In fact, I strongly believe that it is a positive to have a leadership team made up of those who have strong views on both sides of the two extremes in the Whois debate; provided the leaders are willing to collaborate to facilitate consensus in the whole WG in spite of their strong views, it will force the leadership team to grapple with their competing views just like the whole WG will need to do.

In the mid 1990's when generic domain name registrations just started to escalate rapidly, I was managing a customer service team with a group of managers who all had strong views and more often than not disagreed with one another at the outset.  But we worked through our differences and found solutions that were ultimately best for the entire team and our customers.  The fact that we had strong differences forced us to grapple with our differences constructively and allowed us to more effectively deal with the differences on the entire team of several hundred people.

Chuck

From: Alan Greenberg [mailto:alan.greenberg at mcgill.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 8:20 AM
To: Gomes, Chuck; gnso-rds-pdp-wg at icann.org
Subject: Re: [gnso-rds-pdp-wg] RDS PDP WG Leadership

I often support Chuck in his suggestions on how to structure things, but sadly I cannot in this case.

As with many others, I agree to the multi-person leadership group, and will not push much for one option over another. And I agree with Liz that those on the team should not be associated with strong views on the outcomes if at all possible.

But Don is right! Restricting the leadership to GNSO people may be counter productive and will definitely send exactly the wrong message to the overall community. Multi-stakeholderism is not limited to the GNSO, and in the past, we have had PDP WG leaders who were not part of the GNSO (myself included). We may not end up with qualified volunteers from other parts of ICANN, since the workload will be heavy. But a priori excluding them excluding them is ill-conceived on multiple levels.

Alan

At 25/01/2016 03:56 PM, Gomes, Chuck wrote:


In my personal capacity as a volunteer for the RDS PDP WG I would like to propose the following approach to the WG leadership that I think would be very helpful in facilitating our productivity:
*         Have a leadership team consisting of 4 WG members plus the ICANN staff support personnel.
*         Have one leader from each of the four GNSO Stakeholder Groups (SGs):
1.       Non-Commercial SG (NCSG)
2.       Commercial SG (CSG)
3.       Registrars SG (RrSG)
4.       Registries SG (RySG).
*         The four leaders could serve in one of two ways:
o   2 co-chairs & 2 co-vice-chairs
o   1 chair & 3 co-vice chairs.

In recent years in the GNSO, a team leadership approach for WGs and even for the GNSO Council itself has proved to be quite effective.  It not only spreads the workload around but more importantly it allows for a small team of experienced people to collaborate together in leading the group's efforts. Here are a few examples where a collaborative leadership team have been used:
*         The GNSO Council has a chair plus two vice chairs.
*         The Policy & Implementation WG had two co-chairs and two vice-chairs.
*         The CWG Stewardship has two co-chairs.
*         The CCWG Accountability has three co-chairs.

By adding a condition that each of the leadership team members come from different SGs, it ensures that the chairs and vice chairs collectively have expertise about all four of the GNSO stakeholder groups and creates a situation where the leaders are well versed in the varying viewpoints that exist across all four groups as well as differences within their respective groups.  I believe that this is especially important for an area such as Registration Data Services (Whois) that has been very controversial over the entirety of ICANN's history.

For those that are new to GNSO policy development processes, any recommendations made by a WG have to eventually be approved by the GNSO Council, which primarily consists of the four SGs.  So Having all SGs involved in the leadership of the WG from the beginning should facilitate approval in the end.

It is important to remember that the role of the leadership team is to facilitate bottom-up multi-stakeholder policy development in a neutral and effective manner using a consensus based approach.  This of course means managing meetings and online work to ensure that the WG charter requirements are satisfied.  Hopefully, in most cases this will mean guiding the full group in developing recommendations that most if not all of the WG members can support.  But, after diligent efforts to reach consensus, there is still significant divergence about certain proposed recommendations, it will be the leaders responsibility to decide whether there is sufficient support in the WG to submit such recommendations to the GNSO Council.  Understanding this, it is important that each SG endorse the person on the leadership team from its group.

I hope that we can confirm whether or not there is support for this approach in our WG call tomorrow.  If there is, then it will guide our efforts in finding qualified members to serve on the leadership team as well as how to structure the team (2 co-chairs + 2 co-vice-chairs or 1 chair + 3 co-vice-chairs).

I would be happy to respond to any questions anyone has.

Chuck Gomes

P.S. - For those that do not know me, my Statement of Interest (SOI) can be found here: https://community.icann.org/display/gnsosoi/Chuck+Gomes+SOI


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