Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I might start. Alright, good morning. Are we recording this? Is this already on or-
Heidi Ullrich: You can start it now.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you, Heidi. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. This is the ALAC Executive Committee teleconference call on Wednesday, the 9th of February, 2011; and the time is 18:08 UTC.
So we’ll certainly move to the first agenda items. We’ve got quite a nice full agenda, and the first thing is a review of the action items. But before we do that let’s have a quick roll call. Heidi, could you please confirm who is on the line?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes. Currently we have Olivier Crépin-Leblond, we have Cheryl Langdon-Orr, we have Tijani Ben Jemaa, Evan Leibovitch, and from staff- Oh, we have Alan Greenberg, and from staff we have Seth Greene and myself. Have I missed anyone? Okay, Alan I see that you’re on Adobe Connect; I haven’t heard you, though.
Alan Greenberg: Eh, well you weren’t listening then, I guess. Or maybe you weren’t on at the time.
Heidi Ullrich: That was probably it.
Alan Greenberg: For the record, I’m here at Olivier’s request regarding the JAS Working Group discussion, which I assume will come in on the action items and I’ll probably be dropping off soon after that.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. I put a link to the action items in the chat.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, and then thank you very much for joining us, Alan. I think it will be important to hear from the front, as Rod would say. Let’s go swiftly to the action items of the 25th of January, 2011, meeting. I’ll quickly read through them. The first one is populating At-Large standing Working Groups, and the staff was supposed to put out a call to new ALAC members to join the Working Groups.
Heidi Ullrich: If I could update that, the message is ready to go. We’re just correcting some of the broken links on some of those pages of the Working Groups, so we’re hoping to have that finished by (inaudible) and the call will go out later today. So it’s in progress.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: If I may, Olivier?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Please, Cheryl.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: When I went browsing into one of them recently, which actually happened to be the blend of one that grew out of the v4 and the Security & Stability one, I was selfishly concerned that that particular Working Group at least, the listing of the prime lenders is indeed the work group line up that was pre-At-Large Summit. I’m a little concerned as you well know that the v4/v6 Transition Group had its moments in activity, but some of its members were the (inaudible) rank and file members.
I’m all for listing who’s in these things, I think it’s really important, but I think we need to reaffirm people who are in there and also check whether or not like gee, you and me, actually, Olivier, to name two – people who in my case were in both those blended work groups, and you were leading the v4 to v6 transition one that was blended – actually get listed as well.
Now it strikes me that from my point of view, and again, selfishly, I’m probably not going to be listed in any of the memberships of any of the pre-site work groups because I was in them all, but I don’t think yours and my circulation or what work groups we’re in is going to be isolated. So I think we need to, when we do the call out, Heidi, look at those listings and maybe as you’re checking the links put “The following list of members, transiting members, and base it on materials from (inaudible) haven’t surfaced. Maybe update it when we reaffirm, please advise staff if you believe your name is missing.”
Otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time with people screeching at you, as opposed to me that just was in them all and (inaudible).
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. Cheryl, thank you for pointing that out. There’s a little echo on here, but I’m wondering if I could work you today to just go through that before we send the call out, just a sort of quick view?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Is that for Cheryl to answer or-
Heidi Ullrich: Cheryl?
Alan Greenberg: Is Cheryl still with us?
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, let me transfer to another line as well.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: We might have lost Cheryl. Well, let’s take this as an action item. I think that some of the Working Groups have been merged into others, certainly the IPv6 Transition Working Group has been merged into the Technical Issues Working Group. So we certainly need to rationalize those pages and keep them up to date. So let’s put that as an action item, that all of the Working Groups’ pages need to be updated with the latest information, and perhaps also with a historical list of who was on there and who was not on there.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, thank you.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Right, I think we’ll move swiftly on, or should we wait for Cheryl? Are you calling her back or-
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, let me see where we are with that.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well, I’ll move to the next thing because I think that Cheryl knows about this already – the Board/GAC meeting. OCL was to write to the GAC leadership and find out who the topic leaders were, and also writing to the individual GAC members and finding out if they have a specific interest in certain areas; also to find out who is planning to attend. Now, the listing of topic leaders is something which I have been unfortunately unable to get hold of. I have written to the GAC leadership and I have received no reply, sadly.
The writing to individual GAC members has taken place to specific GAC members, and a couple have responded, one being Mark Carvel who leads the efforts on the GAC on the intellectual property issues; and the other one being the US GAC delegates who I understand are leading the efforts on the morality and public order, otherwise known as Recommendation 6.
Obviously GAC members have sometimes input in more than one Working Group, and I have not been able to find out who were the people in charge of any of the other issues, although I understand that, as I just mentioned, there is a lot of cross-community or cross-GAC work. What I’ve also heard is that some GAC members have not been as busy as others, but that’s the usual – nothing new.
So that’s my feedback on that. I’m not sure whether we can say it was done or not, but it’s in progress. Is Cheryl back with us?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yes, I am.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: She is, welcome back. Any comments on this?
Alan Greenberg: I have a question.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Alan has his hand up. Alan?
Alan Greenberg: Yeah, I have a question. Does anyone know anything about the status of that nominally leaked US Department of Commerce memo? The one that had the huge laundry list of demands they would be making, including ones which included intellectual property issues, which I thought were Carvell’s responsibility. I’m just wondering if anyone knows anything – is it really legitimate? Is it on the table?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I personally do not know. Does anyone else have any information to that effect?
Alan Greenberg: Okay.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well, I don’t see any hands up so we take it for what it is. It might be genuine, it might not be genuine, it might be a work in progress. Sometimes work in progress has only one side of the issues, and maybe the work isn’t polished yet for publication. That’s something which we might wish to investigate. But I guess we’ll try and find out, that’s probably the answer I can give you.
Alan Greenberg: Whoever’s keeping the minute notes, my name as more letters in it.
Heidi Ullrich: Alan, as to this letter, when did this supposedly come out?
Alan Greenberg: Oh, a week or so ago. There were various blogs and maybe Circle ID references to it. I can find a pointer to it; I don’t have it in my hand right now.
Heidi Ullrich: Let me see if I can find something out about that.
Alan Greenberg: I doubt if there’s going to be anything official about it. Go ahead.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I would suggest being cautious about this. There is, and I think we’ll mention this a little bit later on with Evan but I can already mention it here, there is a planned conference call with Suzanne of the Department of Commerce on Friday afternoon UTC, where Evan and I will be attending. I’m not sure, we haven’t really worked out who else is going to attend, but this is something in progress as well. It’s very new-
Evan Leibovitch: Actually we already know that but we’ll go through that in a moment when we get to that.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Oh, okay. Thanks very much, Evan. Good. Let’s move on to the next thing, the JAS, Joint Applicant Support charter. And OCL to inform the GNSO Chair that ALAC is proceeding with work on the (break in audio). That’s been done. Very little feedback was received from the GNSO Chair on this. But I wonder whether Alan wishes to, do you wish to address things now or should we wait till later on in the call?
Alan Greenberg: That’s up to you, whatever you want.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I’m just trying to think, later on would be- If my screen did not freeze that would be important. Perhaps we can start talking about this now since it’s not discussed anywhere else further down our agenda. And since you’re already with us, Alan.
Alan Greenberg: Alright.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I understand there was a problem with having two charters and what ALAC has decided to do is move forward with its own charter, and that GNSO had to either respond to this or to see what they were going to do with it. Can you give us a bit more background, please?
Alan Greenberg: Sure. I put it all on a memo I sent out earlier, a week or so ago or whatever. There is no longer a problem with two charters. At one point people threw up their hands and said “It’s impossible, that could never happen, that could never work!” There seems to be no objection to it whatsoever at this point. There’s an acknowledgment that the group will work to presumably the union of the charters, and the GNSO will pass on to the Board or to whoever the report should it choose to. It has also reserved the right automatically – as it has for anything happening in ICANN – the right to comment on the parts that it did not charter.
My only concern at this point is that we give the Working Group something that will allow them to do their job moderately easily, that’s first of all; and second of all that we not set impediments on the process that will lessen the chance that the Board will listen to any of this advice it gives. I sent out a note, there were comments from Evan and Carlton which were- I can only phrase them as “angry” at the GNSO and maybe at me, I don’t know, and certainly disagreeing. What I’m talking about is not pandering to the GNSO; it’s making sure that the Working Group can operate and doesn’t have to write two completely different reports to adjust subtle changes in wording between the two.
So I would suggest that if we are going to modify the charter as we said we would to create a union one, that we do it in such a way that when the Working Group creates its reports it does not have to jump through hoops and go through contortions, and reword documents to meet each of the two charters. That’s about all.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you, Alan. And is there any reaction-
Alan Greenberg: I should add, and I think the way Carlton’s proposed union charter does just that; that it creates words such that the Working Group is going to have a very difficult job addressing its reports to the two groups.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay. Any response from Evan? Is there any- Yes, I see your hand up. Evan, please.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay. Alan, I certainly wasn’t intending to be angry with you. I was being basically very angry with the process that has spent far too much time talking about process and far too little talking about substance. Put it this way: if you just observe things, you notice that even the milestone report of the Working Group so far has to this date never been endorsed by the GNSO.
And there’s a limit to which we can guide our own actions by what the GNSO might do, because after all is said and done I still have in the back of my mind the possibility that no matter what we do, no matter what we say, no matter what accommodations will be made the GNSO isn’t going to back the results of this group anyway.
There’s a strong, I have a strong fear of that and its behavior regarding the pre-Cartagena activity and its refusal to even accept or thank the participants going into that gives a real bad feeling about whether or not it will support the ongoing work of the JAS, no matter what it does to accommodate the GNSO. And Alan, that was the core of my anger.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Alan?
Alan Greenberg: I’ll reiterate what I said here and what I maybe did not say clearly in my note. This is not about pandering to the GNSO. This is not about responding to its actions. A lot of what it did is, I thought was shameful and inappropriate and was bloody wrong because rationales were used which were just completely invalid. And some people I believe are acting honorably and some people I believe have ulterior motives.
All of that being said this is not about the GNSO, so this is about giving the Working Group something which can allow it to report without having to jump through horrible hoops in how it words documents and whether it has to write two completely separate reports, which it might have to at this point.
Evan Leibovitch: Do you have a suggested modification to Carlton’s union document that would make it, shall we say, more acceptable in the way it needs to be?
Alan Greenberg: I could write a replacement. I said I was going to and I was voted down, so I haven’t bothered wasting my time on it.
Evan Leibovitch: It wasn’t so much a matter of voted down – it was, I’m a little concern by the use of the term “replacement.” How much of the modifications that you think are necessary are major modifications as opposed to just tweaking of Carlton’s wording?
Alan Greenberg: I don’t remember Carlton’s enough to say whether it’s tweaking. I will give an example that I gave in the report that again was vehemently shouted at. We used the word “established criteria.” The GNSO said “proposed criteria,” Carlton’s report, his proposal said “propose and establish,” which makes it very hard to word recommendations addressing that particular item.
There were some large statements, there were statements made that “establish” is a far more active verb and it says we’re going to do something, not only propose. But I think that’s rather moot. Yes, our aim is for something to be established but the Working Group can only propose.
Evan Leibovitch: Ah, okay.
Alan Greenberg: There’s things like that that I don’t really care which we use, but if the GNSO was adamant that we use the word “proposed” and in fact we can’t do anything more than propose – this is a Working Group that’s going to make a report to the Board or to us and be forwarded to the Board – then aligning those two so that they’re identically worded doesn’t change what the Working Group’s going to do at all but allows it to create a recommendation which can be addressed at both groups without it having to jump through hoops and reword things.
That was the point and the gist of what I was saying. And by the way, Evan, you said it’s time to work on substance and not process. This was a discussion I targeted at the ExCom, not at the Working Group. I was adamant many times in the Working Group that the Working Group should not be talking about chartering. It should be given the charter and do work to it; it does not need to debate it.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you, Alan. Let’s hear from Tijani. Tijani, you might be muted.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Yes, I was muted, that’s why I am late. Thank you, Alan. I don’t have any problem toward anything established by (inaudible). It’s not a problem for me. We can do any modification like this, because really the Working Group cannot establish – it can only propose. But the problem is that is there any possibility, any willing from the GNSO to accept our proposal, any proposal we do? No, I don’t think so because the GNSO has internal problems already and it is a problem for them. They think that they are making the policy and we don’t, the Working Group cannot-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: GNSO are the only ones who can make the policy in this space. Let’s be really clear, sorry to jump in, but can we be clear? The GNSO as an SO is the only thing that can make policy in the g-space.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: I don’t disagree, Cheryl. I didn’t say-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: (crosstalk) bylaws-
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Excuse me, Cheryl. I never said we would make policy. There is a Resolution 20 from the Board asking for a Working Group to propose sustainable manner to help the applicants. We are doing this work; we are not doing anything else.
[simultaneous conversation]
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Cheryl, we are not proposing policies. We are proposing manner to help-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Absolutely, (crosstalk).
Alan Greenberg: May I get in, please?
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Cheryl, the new charter is now necessary because the Board asked about these precise things, and we are working on those precise things. So I don’t think that anything we will do will be accepted by the GNSO.
Alan Greenberg: Excuse me, may I have the floor? We’re debating something which is irrelevant. The, Tijani, you missed the beginning of the call. The GNSO is no longer objecting at all to having two charters. It is not a question of whether they accept ours or we accept theirs. They are happy to have the Working Group- Since the Working Group is happy they are happy to have the Working Group address two charters.
My suggestion is that we make sure the charters are worded such that the Working Group has a reasonably easy time of reporting its conclusions instead of spending all of its time at the end rewording documents to match the diverse charters where they could be the same. That was the only point I was making.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, right. We’ll have Evan and then we’ll have- I think we’re starting to go a bit round in circles on this one and we need to move on. So, Evan?
Evan Leibovitch: Okay, I’ll keep my comment quick because I’ve already made it repeatedly in email and I’ve just written it in the chat. I don’t think we need to hammer this into the ground and frankly, at this point, since we’re agreed that we’re going to have two charters I don’t think that the kind of difference in wording that you’re talking about, Alan, is going to be a real impediment. If the two charters are there and they have different scopes of things slightly, and one says “propose” and one says “establish,” at this point I don’t think that- Once the JAS Group says “Well, we want to have a foundation which approaches sponsors this way,” that’s not going to have a far reaching effect, whether it’s “propose” or “establish.”
Alan Greenberg: Okay.
Evan Leibovitch: My concern about the wording is what I said in the chat room. I’ll leave it at that so we can move on to other things, but you’re reminding me of all the concerns I had.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, and Cheryl?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I just wanted to check. I thought we were still going ahead with the ALAC resolution to look at a unionization of the charter. Or has that gone by the wayside as well?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well, as far as I’m concerned we’re still going on with that. One thing I’d like us to agree on-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Cause you know, people are talking about two charters again.
Alan Greenberg: Cheryl, I think basically what we’re talking about is the fact that there’s certain things that ALAC wants this group to do that the GNSO simply doesn’t want to happen. So we have two choices: either an intersection document that is the lowest common denominator of what both wants; or a union document which is what we want and what GNSO wants, but the GNSO won’t endorse that. The GNSO doesn’t care about a union document.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Right, I think- Am I unmuted? Yes I am. I think we’ve reached the end of this discussion, and what I’d like to do is to have an AI that this gets taken off this meeting. And perhaps Alan, Evan and Tijani, all three of you could work on an enhancement of the current unionized version.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Olivier, can I encourage you to let Tijani finish his intervention? Otherwise we’ll have to make a time for it for later.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Ah, okay. Sorry, Tijani – I didn’t see your comment in the thing. Sorry, please Tijani.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: No, I will not continue. It’s okay. But I want you to know that I was cut off a lot of times during my intervention and I wasn’t allowed to finish it. That’s all, thank you.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, Tijani, point taken. And I do ask everyone here to please not talk over someone else and cut them off. I’m the only person who can cut everyone off, supposedly. Okay, this was meant to be a joke.
Anyway then we’ll move on to the next part of the action items, if I can see those…
Tijani Ben Jemaa: We are just on action items?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: So are we okay with- So it would be Evan, Tijani and Alan, and Carlton, do you want to also be involved to sort of polish up the charter?
Carlton Samuels: Sure. I’m not sure what will come out of the polishing, but I mean-
Alan Greenberg: Olivier, I’m willing to submit what I think will make the Working Group’s life easier. I don’t want to really enter into debates over it, and I’ll toss that over to you, over to the ExCom members and you can do with it as you wish at that point.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, well let’s start with that, Alan, if you can.
Alan Greenberg: Okay.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Start with a first- I wouldn’t say a “first draft” because I don’t think we need something that is brand new. We need to take what’s there and you need to change it to what you think is going to be clearer.
Alan Greenberg: You will recognize the lineage. Okay, I’ll drop off now. Thank you.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you very much, Alan.
Alan Greenberg: Okay, thank you. Bye-bye.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, right, let’s go back to our meeting and we’re a little bit- Well, we’re very late already but let’s move on. Financial year ’12 budget requests, and the ExCom with OCL leading to have RALO financial year ’12 budget requests placed into broad categories but allocate all requests that are submitted so as not to be a filter.
And that has been completed very well, and in fact I’m extremely pleased with the amount of RALO input that we have had this year. It really is, I think, a great success. Of course we now have to see whether we get that budget, but that’s something which none of us have any take on.
Evan Leibovitch: Heidi, do you have any indication of the way this is being received?
Heidi Ullrich: I do. This is an agenda item later on down the list – should I talk now or then?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Then.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Then. Maybe we should do that a bit later in the five minutes that are allocated.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. It’s only a few minutes.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, Matthias to prepare the initial grouping of the RALO financial year ’12 budget requests to broad categories, that’s been done as well; and Heidi to work with ExCom to request additional basic services for financial ’12. And all of that has been done as well. Any comments? I gather it’s not really something that requires comments.
Geo Regions report is the next one, and Carlton to aggregate RALO views of Geo Regions report into an ALAC statement, draft to be posted into an At-Large Geo Regions workspace and to be sent to ALAC Announce for a few days’ comment. Draft statement is then to be put out for ALAC vote and all of that has been completed.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Can I just make a comment on that, please, Olivier?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Please, Cheryl.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Just that the ALAC statement was singled out by the work group, the Geo Regions Review Work Group, as being extremely useful and one of the only effective documents. And the Work Group felt very much buoyed by the confidence that they saw they could take from having such a clear and thoughtful and auditable process. There were huge thanks all around and we certainly set quite the benchmark there. So excellent.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well thank you very much for this comment, Cheryl, and in fact I should also add a word of thanks to the RALO, the people in the RALOs that took it upon themselves to connect their own regions. And I know from reading through the discussions on the different RALO lists that there was intense discussion on many counts. So that really is another success for the bottom-up process.
Moving on, the San Francisco meeting to have the first ALAC overview discussion on the Geo Regions report, and I see that this topic has been scheduled and completed as well. And I think Heidi might be able to speak to us about this later.
We’ll move on swiftly to the ATRT recommendations, and staff to take Cheryl’s comments on ATRT recommendations from ALAC meeting. That was completed, and may I say that was completed well ahead of the deadline for this. So well done, Cheryl.
And we’ll move on. The At-Large in San Francisco- Oh, any comments with regard to ATRT recommendations, first? No and I see applause from Heidi.
Right, next – At-Large in San Francisco, At-Large staff to work with ccNSO staff in organizing a meeting of ALAC Chairs, VCs, and ccNSO incoming and outgoing Chairs and liaisons in San Francisco. Tentative date is now the 12th of March, and that’s in progress. Any updates on this, Heidi?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, I will provide that update during our discussion on the San Francisco meeting. It’s not going to be the 12th of March. We’re hoping to do it perhaps Tuesday.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, thank you. And Heidi to ask Martin and Annalisa about their ability to work on possible Stanford town halls. Do we have any feedback on this?
Heidi Ullrich: Still to-do, sorry about that. I still need to follow up on that.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: That’s item #22,650 on your task list, Heidi.
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, I know.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Staff to create mailing lists of At-Large ExCom, interested NARALO members and members of the NCUC and (inaudible) people from Stanford. I gather this is all part of the Stanford town hall.
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, yes. And that’s in progress. I heard back from Avri today and she actually only recommended one additional NCUC person, and that is, and I’ll mispronounce this person’s name. It’s the Greek person who is the, Komaitis?
Evan Leibovitch: Konstantinos?
Heidi Ullrich: Konstantinos. I will put that together today.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, thank you. And then Heidi to follow up with ICAAN Meetings regarding involvement of possible Stanford town hall, and I understand that has been completed.
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, and due to the Board/GAC meeting and working on the San Francisco meeting at the same time as preparing the first steps for Amman, they don’t have the bandwidth for that. So if we were to go ahead with that it would really need to be Stanford staff and others working on the details of that.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: And what about the conference calls we organized on whether to go ahead?
Heidi Ullrich: That’s something we can do if you’d like to do that, but do you want to wait until we initiate the mailing list and send out the first message on that list?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Any comments from anyone? Well, I would say wait for the time being. I’d like to see this gel a little more before we organize conference calls and so on. I’m not sure how everyone else feels about this.
Evan Leibovitch: You’re talking about just for San Francisco or ongoing?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: San Francisco. And this is something we might have to just play by ear for the time being, depending on how you progress, Heidi.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, so the next – Heidi Ullrich to prepare draft agendas for Sunday ALAC workshop and Tuesday policy discussion meetings for comments by ExCom and ALAC and that’s been completed. I guess you’ll probably be speaking to us about this a bit later?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: And then Matthias to follow up with RALOs for draft agendas, and that’s completed as well. And Seth to follow up with Work Teams to complete Work Team agendas, and that has also been completed. Seth, any comment on this or should we just move swiftly on?
Seth Greene: Swiftly on, thank you, Olivier.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, thank you. And then finally Evan to prepare formal proposal for local town hall in conjunction with each ICANN meeting. That’s your ongoing, Evan-
Eavn Leibovitch: It’s ongoing and I’m just going to make the comment, I don’t have a lot to report right now but I just want to let you all know that my intention is to propose something that is along the lines of a BarCamp. And I don’t know if any of you have worked with this kind of format before. I’ve just sent out a link to the Wiki for this.
What this is, is it’s a very community-driven, not totally structured event that I actually have some experience being a part of and running. It has some extremely good benefits of number one, local engagement; number two, not totally setting the agenda and letting the local community do it. They also tend to be very inexpensive to run.
So I’m going to follow up on this and I invite everybody to follow that link I just put in the chat room on the BarCamp idea of doing that rather than calling it a town hall. And I’ll be following up on this.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you very much, Evan, and I see approval from Cheryl. So I think that’s certainly something to look at and very interesting indeed, and certainly also low cost, which is bound to please our Finance Department. And that is off the record probably.
Moving on to the next items, I think we’ve gone through all the agenda items which was supposed to take five minutes and have taken 40 minutes, so let’s move quickly to the items for discussion, starting with a review of the San Francisco At-Large meeting agendas. And I gather it says here “Olivier and staff” but probably more Heidi than me. Heidi, you have the floor.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, thank you. I’m going to put the link in…
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Heidi’s line’s dropping.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Heidi’s line is not doing too well.
Heidi Ullrich: I don’t know what’s going on. Can you hear me? [break in audio] Can you hear me?
Evan Leibovitch: We can hear bits of you, but not all of you.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. [break in audio]
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Someone is right next to an airport.
Carlton Samuels: That’s me with a helicopter flying overhead.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, thanks Carlton. Well, we’ve lost Heidi. Is Seth still online?
Seth Greene: Yes, hi Olivier. I’ve just informed call manager Adigo that we’ve lost her and they’re trying to get her back.
Heidi Ullrich: Actually I’m here. Is this better?
Seth Greene: Yes.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Now we can hear you, Heidi, yes.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. Let’s go- If we can click onto the “Sunday Events.” So what I’d like to do is just go through the various agendas.
Evan Leibovitch: We might have lost Cheryl.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, Seth, can you take care of that please while I start going through the Sunday agenda?
Seth Greene: Certainly.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. Does everyone have the Sunday agenda open?
Evan Leibovitch: I do.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: My agenda is opening very slowly but you can move ahead because I have already memorized most of it, so-
Heidi Ullrich: Again, Sunday is-
Carlton Samuels: Did you send a link?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, it’s on the Adobe Connect.
Carlton Samuels: Okay.
Heidi Ullrich: Let me put it into the ExCom chat for you, Carlton.
Carlton Samuels: I’ve got it. I got it, I got it, not to worry.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. So basically Sunday is our traditional all-day workshop and what we’re going to do this time is start with 90 minutes of the At-Large Improvements, where the Work Team chairs will give a status update and then the ALAC will be discussing the next steps of that. It’s key that at this stage, towards the end of the entire project we need to get the involvement of ALAC, so that’s the idea behind that.
Then following that, the plan for the At-Large Improvements, as you’ll see throughout the week we’ll have meetings of the individual meetings and then we’ll have a follow-up at the wrap-up session. So again, it’s a whole series of meetings intended to lead to greater ALAC involvement towards the completion of this project.
Then the next item will be- Oh, we have actually it’s two hours of At-Large Improvements because we do want to dedicate enough time to that and at past meetings we haven’t had that time. And then the next item-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: If I may, sorry Heidi, if I may – this is in response to criticisms that there hasn’t been enough time given for the Work Teams to present their work. Certainly we’ve had to remove this from previous agendas due to lack of time, so this time we really will have a lot of time to do it. Thank you.
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, yes. We prioritized this. Then in the morning we’re also going to have the At-Large outreach/inreach issues again, and we’re hoping to have Scott, we’re hoping to have Barbara Clay but if we can’t get her we’ll definitely have Scott Pinzon; and then we’ll have also Mandy Carver from Global Partnerships and perhaps some of the new, we have a new liaison in the Latin American region and perhaps we can have an introduction to him.
Then we’re going to again, due to the success of the working lunch in Cartagena, we’re going to have another working lunch, a teambuilding exercise. Currently I’ve put down the moderator as Sebastien, but I’ve also put Cheryl. So it’s up to you who you would like to ask to be the moderator of that session. Is Cheryl back?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yeah, I’m back and have you checked that Sebastien would be available as opposed to busy with Board things?
Heidi Ullrich: No, I have not checked that.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Board things tend to be all-consuming at ICAAN Meetings, so it might be very superfluous.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, okay. So would the priority be Sebastien first if he has the time or Cheryl? Do we just put Cheryl?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Can we just not have both?
Evan Leibovitch: Well actually I wanted to ask, Heidi, do you have something in mind as far as a specific program or is whoever’s running this going to be expected to come up with the exercise?
Heidi Ullrich: Well again, Cheryl proposed the working lunch program last time and it worked exceptionally well. It’s basically just a chance for the ALAC members and the regional officers to get to know each other on a more personal level by speaking little bits about non-ICANN related issues. And again, it’s just one hour over lunch, and due to the unions at the hotel we are not able to actually bring in pizzas as we were originally planning on it so everyone will need to go out and get a sandwich in the hotel lobby and then just come back in.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, I think it’s particularly important, especially for the new ALAC members who might not be knowledgeable of the whole team, so that’s something I would favor.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. So I’ll put Cheryl down as the moderator. Cheryl-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Cheryl, you have your hand up. Did you want to-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I’ve got my hand up for later to do with San Francisco, so…
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Oh, okay. Thank you.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: But it isn’t for the Sunday session.
Heidi Ullrich: Cheryl, can we put you down as the moderator for that?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yes, I guess.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, so I’ll put that down. Okay. Then in the afternoon I’ve put down 30 minutes of David Olive and Filiz Yilmaz. Again, she’s the Director of Participation and Engagement, just to talk a little bit about the PPC and her plans for increasing engagement.
And I’ll just continue until I hear otherwise. And then we continue with one hour of an update on the fiscal year ’12 budget development process – Akram and Juan. And by that time we will definitely have the details and next steps for the At-Large requests for the fiscal year ’12.
Then the last part of the day will be a new gTLD update. Evan, I’ve put you down as the moderator for that session. Olivier, if you could give 30 minutes of an update from that (inaudible) meeting; perhaps Rudi, who’s also going to be at that meeting, could also come in with what he thought the meeting was about. And then Evan, I’m giving you 45 minutes to talk about your view of the AGAT Working Group.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, and then just the last- Then we have 15 minutes. Olivier, I’ve put you as just the moderator of the (inaudible) reporting of non-At-Large meetings, and then we’ll have Christina Rodriguez – And this is an action item from Cartagena, 30 minutes to talk about the update on the Language Services guidelines, which as you probably know have been in the works for nearly a year now and she’s saying that she’s very much hoping that that will be in draft, final draft form by San Francisco.
Okay. So if you can click, if you go to the top of your screen you can click on “Monday.”
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Cheryl, do you have any comments so far?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Well, I can, I’ll interject it now if you like. One of the things out of the Geo Regions Work Group meeting that we recently had, we discussed that we would be bringing out, not as an official paper but a paper that will be coming out shortly after San Francisco but we’ll have it in early draft form by the San Francisco meeting – our next steps, a very early next steps concept out of the last Geo Regions paper that we’ve just responded to.
And it strikes me that it might be very smart for us to have a small lump of time somewhere, that’s why I wanted to throw it into the mix, for us to discuss with the regional representation and the ALAC as a whole some of their gut reactions to what some of these options might be. So if we can wedge in a Geo Regions Review Work Group interaction Rob can come in, the chair can come in, obviously Carlton and I will be there and chew the fat on that topic at some point. That would be really good.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, you’ll see we have that for Tuesday, I believe the second policy session 2 we have that.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Thank you.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, so moving quickly on, Monday I’ll go through very quickly. We have basically a NARALO meeting, a LACRALO meeting, the NARALO showcase event; and again, those of you who may not have heard, thanks to Olivier we have confirmed keynote speaker Vint Cerf at the NARALO showcase. So we have informed Barbara Clay and Scott Pinzon of our coup and they’re going to be working with us to make sure that it gets the promotion that it deserves, and we’re also working with Meetings to ensure that we have the best possible space for the crowd that we are expected to get on that. Okay.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Heidi, if I can just interject quickly, you are working closely with Eduardo on this, are you?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, well Matthias is. But yes, we see a NARALO Working Group meeting.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Yes, they have to be involved as much as possible. And I think it’s important that they take leadership on this.
Evan Leibovitch: They were already in the process of putting together sponsorship proposals, and I believe the main targets of the sponsorship attempts right now are Google, Cira, PIR. And I don’t think they have any contacts into VeriSign, but you’d think with someone like Vint giving the keynote it might be easier to get sponsorship.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, good. Thanks.
Heidi Ullrich: And we’ve also, just in case a sponsorship does not come through we’ve already had confirmation that we have a decent-sized budget for drinks and snacks. Again, if hundreds of people come then I don’t know if we’re going to have much to give them, but we have enough for about 60 to 75 people for that event.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: You’re giving them Vint. That should satisfy anyone.
Heidi Ullrich: That’s what we were thinking. You’ll have food for thought with Vint, but I think they also want real food. But Cheryl’s idea is we’ll definitely have a nice bottle of wine to give him as a thanks, and we’ll work on all of that. (Sivo) is going to be in charge of the protocol for all of that and she’ll do a fantastic job as ususal.
So quickly moving to Tuesday, we have an apology from those Working Team A members. We have a 7:30 AM meeting for that session, apologies Cheryl and Evan. Then moving quickly we have starting at 8:30 we have the ALAC policy discussion part 1. Our staff briefings Olivier and I thought would be interesting, to start with would be the new manager of IDN Fast Track and that’s (Nayala Saurez), a lovely lady who is doing a great job stepping into some big shoes. So she’ll speak with us first.
Then we’ll have Pam Little and Stacey Burnett talking to us on Compliance issues. We’re very much hoping that they’ll have some news on staff at that time, and then we’ll have Liz Gasster and Steve Sheng talking about a WHOIS update. Liz will be able to not only update us on the WHOIS Review Team but also on the studies that are progressing very slowly. But there might be some update there.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay, Heidi, one small correction. Seth, Hiro and myself have basically come to the agreement that given that Working Team A has accomplished most of what it needed to, we’ve shortened the meeting. So you can actually set that for 7:55 instead of 7:30.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. How about- Okay, we can start that, if you’d like to do that- I’ll see if I can change that because I’ve already submitted the meeting form. So if you-
Evan Leibovitch: You can. Seth, I think it’s fair to say the people in the Working Group itself will probably not show up until about 8:00-ish.
Seth Greene: Right.
Heidi Ullrich: Do I just say 8:00 then? Can I just say 8:00? 8:00 to 8:30?
Evan Leibovitch: In terms of staff support that will be fine. I mean-
Heidi Ullrich: That would be lovely for us, too. And I’ve requested that that meeting room be the same meeting room as the main ALAC room, so you don’t need to move.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, so I’ll make that change, 8:00 to 8:30 for that one. Thank you, that’s nice of you.
So okay, ALAC- So again the last topic on policy discussion 1 will be a hot topic discussion, and that’s again anything that the ExCom of ALAC determined to be a topic that needs to be discussed. We have 30 minutes for that.
Then after the coffee break we will have the ALAC policy discussion part 2, and Cheryl, this is where we have 45 minutes for the Geo Regions. Now this was initially going to be developing an ALAC overview, which was an action item from a previous ExCom. But we can definitely bring Rob in and have a more general discussion.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Well, it would be a more specific discussion because we’ll have an early draft paper which will allow our regions to then take that, not only what will then be going out for public comment with a bit of tweaking, but also some informed debates and discussions between the regions back to their ALS’s. So-
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. So in addition to Rob who else should we invite?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Oh, I’d have to check.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. We’ll put that on there.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: You could end up with everyone on the Work Group, which would be fabulous.
Carlton Samuels: That would be just fine.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. What’s the size of the Working Group?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: You mean the working Working Group or the actual Working Group?
Heidi Ullrich: The actual Working Group, the actual one. Who’s likely to show up, basically?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: It’s about eight people.
Carlton Samuels: Six or eight, isn’t it?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Yes Carlton, you are wanting to say something?
Carlton Samuels: No, I was just answering the question for Heidi.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, thank you. I’ll let meeting staff know about that. Okay, then we have-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Heidi, if I can just jump in at the moment. We’re reaching the hour – is everyone okay with extending for another half an hour because we really are going-?
Carlton Samuels: I could stay for another half hour.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Everyone okay? Tijani, you’re okay? Okay, perfect. Right, okay, let’s move on then. Thank you, Heidi.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. And then the second session on Tuesday, policy discussion part 2, we have the new gTLDs with Kurt Pritz. So we would like to have him give an official view of what the GAC/Board meeting was and also the next steps. And we also have, it might be of interest not only Kurt but we also have Michael Salazar who is the person who’s actually going to be leading the, once the new gTLDs launch will actually be leading the technical work and the everyday work. So if you’d like to meet him that might be possible as well.
Carlton Samuels: Actually, that might be a better move to meeting him.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, well I can bring both in. I have to check if he’ll be there but I would assume. Okay, so I’m going to bring Michael in, okay.
Then the afternoon continues with Working Teams B & C, let’s see… Yeah, Working Team B at 13:00 to 14:00. Then, now this is again, the next one listed is the ALAC meeting with the ccNSO; we still are working with Bart and the ccNSO secretariats on whether we’re going to have this formal meeting or whether we’re going to have more of an informal meeting just with the ALAC and the ccNSO Chairs and Vice-Chairs. So this particular meeting is still very much to be confirmed, and we’ll get back to you on that.
Okay, then the meeting with the SSAC, that actually is going to be moved I believe it 16:00 to 17:00, just to avoid the coffee break. And currently we have on our agenda introduction/update to the ALAC and SSAC – this will be the first time that they’ve, I believe Cheryl, you said since Cairo, and they have two new Chairs. They have a Chair and a Vice-Chair on the SSAC. And then I thought that we would have a discussion of common interests, in particular SSAC 044, and talk about next steps.
Any comments there?
Carlton Samuels: It works for me.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. Then we have at 17:00 to 18:00 the APRALO monthly meeting. Okay, moving to Wednesday. Tijani, let me know if I’m speaking too fast for you.
Okay, Wednesday 9:00 to 10:30 we have the At-Large regional leadership meeting. That’s the secretariats’ meeting, and they’re having a call I believe next week so they will set their agenda. Then we have Working Team C on Wednesday at 11:00 to 12:00.
Now we also have the ALAC with the Board’s meeting. Again, we haven’t confirmed this. We don’t know whether it’s even going to be a lunch or whether we’re going to be in a dinner. We have been in near constant contact with Diane about this but just, it’s always the case where we get confirmation late. So we will keep you informed as we hear more about that.
And then we have At-Large Improvements Working Team D, 15:00 to 16:00. At 16:00 to 17:00 we have the ALAC meeting with the registrars. Currently we have, Mason has confirmed that barring any other meetings that we don’t know about; and the agenda item for that is again, an action item from Cartagena – a discussion of whether registrars should provide information that the ALAC could aggregate for general use of interest to consumers and for outreach and education. And again, Mason is aware of that and has not signaled one way or the other about that item.
Then, Tijani, we have currently the AFRALO/AfrICANN joint meetings, 17:00 to 18:00. Again, Tijani, I see you have your hand raised but I do know the time is not the best time for people in Africa to join remotely, so that’s something that you might want to discuss. So Tijani, did you have a comment?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: You might be muted.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: May I speak? May I speak? Do you hear me?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Yes, absolutely. We hear you, Tijani.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Okay, okay thank you. I was muted, that’s why. So sure, the time is not the best but I have another problem. I sent you today an idea regarding to advance this timing by half an hour because we have a request from the NomCom to meet with us. And I think that the best way is to merge the meeting with the NomCom with this meeting. So I propose you to begin at 16:30, but I see if it is the same room that will be used for the meeting with the registrars it will be impossible.
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, and actually I mean by moving that, even if it is a different room you’re going to be missing part of that meeting with registrars.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Yes, I know, but we need this half an hour. It’s- I cannot ask you to put it at 18:30 for it will be too late.
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, actually it might be because in San Francisco there’s going to be a lot of evening events. And actually Wednesday is the Gala. So okay, let me move that to 16:30 to 18:00.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Okay, 16:30 to 18:00. Okay. It will be better to begin earlier for the African people and it will give us the half an hour to meet with the NomCom people.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, so on the agenda the first item will be, after the introduction and purpose of meeting will be talking with the NomCom.
Tijani Ben Jemaa; Perhaps, I don’t know. The NomCom, it will not bother them to come at the end because I am afraid that the African people will not come if it is too late.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: So I prefer to begin with the AFRALO and AfrICANN meeting, and at the end half an hour for the NomCom. And NomCom wants APRALO only. AfrICANN is not needed for the NomCom.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, so just AFRALO you said?
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Yeah.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Okay? And here also is another thing – we will be addressing the Geo Regions, the geographic regions, and I think that this topic is very important and especially for the African region. That’s why I propose to discuss it in a wider attendance, more attendees from Africa so that we can have that feedback. We prepared only the position of the AFRALO but I want the feedback of the African community of ICANN even if they are not At-Large.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. Olivier, I see that Evan is commenting on the need for an ALAC/GAC meeting.
Olivier Crepi-Leblond: Yes. And we haven’t got one at the moment, I think, do we?
Heidi Ullrich: No, no.
Evan Leibovitch: I’m really amazed not to see that here because number one, when I first asked why there wasn’t one in Cartagena and I was told “Well, there’s a standing one every second meeting.” Okay, so alright – we’re now in our alternate meeting and it’s not there. If anything we need to have it more often and have basically, shall we say an Advisory Committee forum? Call it what you want – something that brings together the ACs. If it’s not just GAC and ALAC then bring in SSAC and bring in, you know, the Advisory Committees need to talk. They need to get together and they need to discuss common goals. I’m really, really amazed not to see this on our schedule considering that we didn’t have one in Cartagena.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you, Evan. Cheryl?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Well, just following on what Evan said – yes, not only that last year, but the discussion that Frank and Evan and I had; we initiated I gather, Evan, from a GAC perspective where prior planning for a mutualized agenda and to shift it to every meeting between GAC and ALAC was proposed by at least some parts of the GAC. So it goes beyond the “Why the hell isn’t it? We’re supposed to,” and very much into action items arising out of the meetings that we had in Cartagena.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you, Cheryl. Heidi, can we remedy this?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Can you work on this after the call or in the next couple of days?
Heidi Ullrich: I’ve already taken a jab at- I’ve just messaged Nancy Lupiano saying “We have an urgent need to add a meeting.” I have to see, she’s just responding- What day would you prefer that on?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: That’s up to the GAC.
Heidi Ullrich: Ah, okay. This is something Olivier and the GAC Chair has to sort out. Well, on the other issue Evan raised, again, Olivier, you need to make sure that you get revitalization of the AC/SO Chairs’ lists and interactions, because that’s exactly what happens when those things work – what Evan was calling for, the ACs and the SOs talking to each other or the ACs talking to each other.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well, there is a conference call taking place.
Carlton Samuels: With the GAC?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: No, no – ACs and SOs tomorrow afternoon, which I will be attending but so far it’s- Well, I’ll only know more once it actually takes place. I can’t tell you any more than that.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, so Olivier, if we can work together on that. Meetings have said that if we do need to submit another form, no problem; otherwise I’ll work with staff in order to- Mm-hmm?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I’ll be quite frank with you. I’ve had trouble getting hold of Heather at the GAC, and I don’t seem to be the only person who’s had trouble getting hold of her. So I’ll obviously have to try other ways to get a hold of her or maybe we can try to go through staff. But Heidi and I will work on this.
Evan Leibovitch: Yeah, I think right now-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Your hand is up?
Evan Leibovitch: I think right now meetings in San Francisco are probably the least of the GAC priorities right now.
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I think Evan, following on from what we had agreed, I’m not overly discomforted if we just get a formal meeting with the GAC in its usual bi-meeting cycle, and what we were planning to do between Cartagena and San Francisco is done and Amman, because GAC were not planning on doing this dog and pony show that they’re now doing when we were speaking.
Evan Leibovitch: Yeah, we need to have something substantive. Something that is the usual thing where basically both sides just sit and give progress reports to each other won’t cut it, and obviously there needs to be a certain amount of prep done in advance. I’d say right now the GAC is preoccupied with other things, but going forward we need to start building these bridges.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yep. And so if we just do the fallback to the usual “every two meetings here we go,” and just stop the clock (inaudible) thing about what our plans were. And Olivier, you need to make sure that your part of the discussions with Frank and the GAC Vice-Chairs and other people that they were going to allocate to that, that that will happen probably if you also have some unofficial little chats while you’re in the Brussels meeting as well.
Evan Leibovitch: And remember, we’re talking to the American people the end of this week.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: And remember I saw Mark Carvell this afternoon. But this is something I’ll expand on in a moment, but definitely.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: It’ll happen, just not in the short-term planning that we wanted it to. But it’ll happen.
Carlton Samuels: Yeah, you can’t do that. We have 15 minutes.
Evan Leibovitch: Yep, but the immediate thing is get it up on the agenda for San Francisco.
Carlton Samuels: Yeah.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay. Let’s move swiftly on, please.
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, thank you, Evan, for bringing that up and we’ll sort this out. Okay, let me get back to my schedule.
Okay. So then moving on to Thursday, Thursday is basically just the wrap-up session, 9:00 to 11:00. And again we’re going to be prioritizing the At-Large Improvements so they will get 45 minutes in the beginning. Then we will have 45 minutes for review and wrap-up of ALAC business, and then 30 minutes for a report from regional Chairs.
Now, just to let you know, also Thursday immediately following that meeting from 11:00 to 12:30 will be the Abuse of the DNS Forum. We have not talked about the people from At-Large on that yet but I’ll give you a feedback once we do. And again in the afternoon will be the public forum which all meetings will be – no other meetings can be held during that time.
I’ve also just heard that Steve Antonoff will be there in San Francisco talking about the new Travel guidelines, the draft Travel guidelines, and that he would like to hold a public meeting. And he’s aiming right now for Thursday, which would not be great for us. So that brings us to either moving that or having him move the ExCom on Friday.
So if we can move to Friday… Again, we have a very short period because again, due to the union at the hotel in San Francisco the internet will be shut off at 15:30, so we have our meeting from 11:30 to 15:30, and currently the topics on the agenda are again, bringing Akram in and Juan in for just a little bit to talk about a very frank – as Cheryl said a very frank and fearless – discussion on where we’re going with the fiscal year ’12 budget. And then have new gTLD next steps; and then also we have 25 minutes for any other business on that.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you very much, Heidi. It’s very interesting to see how everything is being put together, and you seem to have done a lot of work to put this schedule up. I see Evan’s hand up at the moment. Evan? You might be muted, Evan.
Evan Leibovitch: Oh sorry, that’s the residual hand. I’m lowering it.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay. Any other comments on this? Right. I think, well Cheryl says that Heidi has had plenty of practice. Yes, that certainly was a rather filled schedule for the week.
But let’s move on quickly to the next items on the agenda. I realize we’ve only got 15 minutes until the end of our call and we’re already over time. So the next part is the At-Large financial year ’12 budget requests, and the initial feedback from the ICANN Controller, I gather that would be Juan- Have we got any feedback, Heidi?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, very briefly. We have a little bit of feedback from Juan and Janice. Basically they’re going to be meeting today to go through the official templates. What they’ve been doing in the meantime are some constituencies whose templates were not very complete. They’d been working with them to make them more complete, so given that- Which I think is good news because it’s not us. So apparently our templates have enough information for them to go on.
So again, after today, after they start discussing the initial way forward, then we will have more of a report from Juan which I’ll pass on to you.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you, Heidi, and I’d like to put on the record that I’d like to thank everyone who was involved with putting those proposals in all of the regions. It was really overwhelming to see how much activity there is and how many projects would be possible out there – really, really impressive. Any comments from anyone?
And I see no comments so we’ll move quickly over to the next item. And Evan, you have five minutes to explain to us the AGAT update and next steps.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay. We now have a group formed. We have a page on the Wiki. We are trying still to get some GAC people in, and Olivier, you and I hopefully may get some progress on that by week’s end. Heidi, you’ve told us that we should get ready to have a first call and so essentially that’s what we need to do.
So the intention is within the next few days to kick start things, meaning to set up an initial call, essentially defining the specific things we need to do and then how to do them; which effectively means identifying the parts of the DAG that are contentious that are the issues we need to address; assign individuals with expertise and some penmanship to be able to start crafting alternative wording while we make sure that in a larger sense we are basically on the same page in terms of what we want.
That was less than five minutes.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you very much, Evan, and I see that Cheryl’s still not on the call. Was she dropped again? If something could be done to bring her back please.
Thank you, Evan. I have something to add to this actually. This afternoon I spent two and a half hours with Mark Carvell, the UK GAC representative, and we spoke primarily of the intellectual property issues which I believe is something that the AGAT will be looking at.
I mentioned the AGAT work and he really was very interested, and really hoped that we would be able to get some document or something ready before Brussels. So the pressure is on to have results on Day 7.
Evan Leibovitch: Is he offering to help make sure that the GAC point of view, or at least his point of view is- If he’s not an active participant, can he at least, either himself or some other people be some GAC observers, just to make sure we’re not going off in any weird direction from them?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I think there might be a positive answer to this, and I’m saying “might” because the way I see it at the moment, most GAC members who are involved with the preparation for the Brussels meeting appear to be overworked or at least stressed about the amount of email that comes through their mailbox at the moment. So I will try as a follow-up email to him but he has not given me a positive answer today.
Evan Leibovitch: What about the trying to draft somebody who isn’t knee deep in the Brussels preparation from the GAC, who could still participate with us?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well, good idea. Whether we can find such a person or not is another question. I will try and find out with him. It certainly would have been a lot easier had the GAC Chair been able to respond to us on this, but we’ll try further avenues. But in any case, do not wait upon GAC to come back to you in order to start work on this. I think it needs to be ASAP effected, and I guess others will tag onto it.
Evan Leibovitch: Understood. What I will try to do, I will do my best to try and get out a Doodle by the end of the day on trying to figure out a time that’s good for everybody that’s at least participating at this time.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Super. Any comments from anyone? I see no comments, and is Cheryl back with us? Yes, Cheryl is back. Welcome back.
We’ll move on to the At-Large plans for the GAC/Board meeting and I’ll take less than 10 minutes about this. I’m planning to go to Brussels to be there as an observer, and I believe that Rudi Vansnick will also be there and a few others who yet haven’t made up their mind but who are likely to go – certainly anyone living in Brussels might be attending as well.
Our preliminary work which is currently taking place: as I mentioned just earlier, I spoke to Mark Carvell for an extended amount of time and we went through some of the concerns that their governments and their, well, whoever was providing input on their side had. And I’m trying to address some of these concerns referring back to the Special Trademark Interest Working Group document, which was processed, which was written already more than a year ago.
It appears that not all of the recommendations of the STI had been passed over to either the GAC or the Board, which is exactly how we thought things had happened; and certainly there was progress made on a number of things. Mark has told me he will keep in touch with me in order to keep us up to date with their progress. As Evan mentioned a bit earlier we have a conference call with the US GAC representatives on Friday morning, and that will probably deal with the Recommendation 6 and perhaps other discussions as well. The agenda is not really cast in stone.
There isn’t much else to report prior to Brussels. I’d certainly like to have some kind of roadmap for me to be able to follow. Although I won’t be able to speak in the meeting itself we obviously have a Skype chat that works and that has been set up, which will enable everyone to have an input. And I’ll be on there to be able to relay any of our concerns in the breaks, which means going and latching onto whoever comes out of the room and trying to put some sense into them if they didn’t make sense in the room itself.
Any comments on this?
Evan Leibovitch: Heidi, has ICANN published a list of the people that are being accepted as subject matter experts? That area of the participants was kind of cloudy to me.
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, I’ve spoken to David about that and he [break in audio] same list of the people that have been working with them on the studies.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay, so this is nobody new; these are the same consultants that ICANN has contracted to help it since they went-
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, I believe so. I can follow up on that, if we can get some official wording on that.
Evan Leibovitch: Okay, I just- I was just concerned that we were going to see some IP lawyer show up as a subject matter expert on the rapid suspension system.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Certainly the feedback that I got from Mark Carvell was that they did not only have input from trademark lawyers, and obviously the balance is something that is important in any document; that they will work with some of their- As I said some of their people have concerns but there’s also a concern, and I think I put the point well across that the concern for recommendations should not be vastly different from what the community recommendations were because the community already went through an extensive process with an enormous amount of time spent on these issues to try to find a suitable solution for all.
That’s all with regards to this point. Maybe we should move with the next part, which is the next item, which is the Board resolution on consumer choice, competition and innovation; and the next steps. With regards to this, there have been discussions taking place by email to find out how this is going to move forward. Certainly no- Well, there is some kind of obstruction, I don’t even want to use the word “obstruction” but some kind of delay with regards to the GNSO on this, and that they believe that their staff doesn’t have enough time to deal with this issue right away.
A proposal has been made informally, I gather, that this subject matter would be more inclined to be properly dealt with between the San Francisco and the Amman meeting; and a further proposal has been that rather than having a Cross-Constituency Working Group on this, the process would include a discussion – an open discussion that would hopefully take place in Amman. Are there any comments on this from anyone?
Evan Leibovitch: I’m sorry, I didn’t raise my hand but Olivier, this is something that- I mean you say it’s been done informally. I was involved with the original Work Teams on the RAA amendments, and where they wanted to have a subgroup that was going to list things, what they called “registrant rights.” And then we started talking about what should registrant rights be? Well, they said “We don’t want to deal with that.”
And even in the final report of the RAA Amendment Working Group, they said, and I think I posted the PDF to it in either an email or in the Skype chat, that essentially they’ve even pushed it off – I’d say formally – onto ALAC. They may claim otherwise simply as a matter of trying to keep their fingers into it, but clearly when the issue was brought forward about issues of registrant rights and protecting registrants and end users, when the issue came up in the working group they had no taste for it; and in fact, formally put into their slides and report that this is something that ALAC was going to take on.
So given the current nature of the GNSO’s shall we say “friendliness” towards cross working groups, this may be something that we may need to sort of start off on our own. And then somebody has to start pushing this snowball down the hill and get it collecting steam and size. This may need to be something that we need to take the initiative.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you, Evan. Cheryl.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Just following on a little bit from what Evan was saying, I think we need to just make sure we see the benefits of having a reaction and a process that deals specifically with the Board resolution relooking towards competition and innovation, because that’s specifically out of the Affirmation of Commitments. And so our leadership and equitable involvement with other parts of ICANN, if indeed they come to pass – which probably will happen out of the current “let’s discuss it with a sort of open forum and then build something out of it…”
It’s probably a very good thing because they’re a part of GNSO who are actually very (inaudible) about getting this sort of thing done. They just don’t happen to be sitting necessarily in power positions on the Council right now, that’s all.
But what it would do, Evan, both by dealing with the very specific requirements for definitional work so that the AOC is better understood and has a framework that we can all benchmark, will then actually lead to getting what we want out of registrant’s rights and the aspirational document done with a whole lot more clout. So I think they’re complementary, and I think it’s one step following the other.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Thank you very much, Cheryl. Any other-
Evan Leibovitch: Just a very quick follow-up, and it’s something that we need to deal with, and I think we need to deal with it quickly because this is something that ICANN has danced with around for a long time, and that is what they consider a consumer to be. This has been danced around and danced around, and has got people pulling their hair out over endless discussion over this.
But ICANN refuses to actually determine whether or not they consider a consumer in their definition and according to what they have done from the Board and the AOC- Is a consumer a registrant, which is the bottom of their economic food chain, or does it include end users? And that, somebody has to come out and state that.
What has happened is because of the term “consumers” being used in a very, very ambiguous way, they’ve essentially stymied any effort to get some traction on this.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: How do you suggest moving forward on this, Evan?
Evan Leibovitch: There’s a couple of ways, but some of them involve basically ALAC saying “This is what we determine it to be, and based on that we’re moving ahead.” We’ve been engaging in this, there’s the consumer forums that Rosemary and Beau have been working on – we could do it there. But frankly, this has been going around the block for an awful long time, and it threatens to continue to go around the block until somebody puts a stake in the ground and says “Okay, here it is. If you disagree with it that’s fine, but at least that’s better than everybody arguing over even the definition.”
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Does anything need to move before San Francisco or is it okay to move it till after San Francisco?
Evan Leibovitch: I think there’s enough on the agenda in and before San Francisco that this is probably not going to be the highest of priorities, but there’s a good inclination to start the groundwork there.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: We’ll continue to push it from the Board, and Rosemary and Bruce work hand in glove in Australia. So let’s use that to our advantage, shall we?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay. Let us, so let’s set that up as an actual item and put it high up on our list of things to be done. Any other comments? Carlton, perhaps, or Tijani, you have any view on the matter?
Carlton Samuels: No, I am- I think Evan has probably shared as best as I would.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: And Tijani? You might be muted. That’s interesting.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: It’s not me for once.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, no, that was Carlton. Okay. Heidi mentions that on the chat that Bruce suggested a meeting in Amman. Do we want one in San Francisco as well?
Evan Leibovitch: What kind of meeting do you mean?
Heidi Ullrich: Basically any kind of meeting that is going to move this forward, for example it might be the Rosemary and Cheryl meetings that they’ve held on the consumer issues – that might be a forum that we can have some forward movement on that.
Evan Leibovitch: There’s no problem with having a consumer forum. I’m starting to think that this may be something that ALAC has to drive itself and invite other people and other constituencies to come. But I have a feeling that we may be the ones driving this.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I’m not sure that the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group would agree totally with that, Evan, but anyway- And certainly, from Work Groups involved with policy development within the GNSO world, PEDNIR being for example one of them, when we’re looking at the consumer outreach, end user outreach and education programs, etc. And yes, that was restricted to registrants.
As I think Alan mentioned through the ExCom list in response to something else, we’re seeing a lot of support for the best practices and guidelines and aspirational documents on registrant rights and expectations; the whole kit and caboodle being developed over the next little while, which to some extent crosses over with the registrar/ALAC work that’s going on. But we’ve also have the Business Constituency putting up their hand and saying as registrants and end users, they’d be very keen to be contributory to parts of those processes.
So whilst we’re seeing shall we say some challenging management styles out of the Council in the GNSO world, I’m seeing more interest in the rank and file constituency end of the GNSO world than I’ve seen for a couple of years now. So I think it’s not all bad, is what I’m saying.
Evan Leibovitch: I think in fact it’s not only “not all bad” but it’s totally consistent with what I’m saying. All I’m suggesting at this point is that we may not be in a comfort position of waiting for a Council to endorse some action to work on this. We can start something that is an initiative of ALAC but certainly invite everybody from the community to participate. That, by definition, is the way we work.
So all I’m saying is we may not and probably should not wait for Council to get involved in this initiative. We know there’s lots of people within GNSO that are interested, we’ve seen that. I’ve also been in a GNSO Working Group where I’ve literally been shouted down on interest of registrant rights. So I don’t think we can count on GNSO as a body to support us. There’s constituencies and individuals who want to work with us but somebody’s got to start the ball rolling.
I don’t think we can count on Council to be that initiative so we may have to do it ourselves-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: (crosstalk) …coming from the Board resolution down is the best tool we have, cause, right? The Board asking for something has clout.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I think that is how we will have to pursue this. Just follow from the Board’s decision and the Board resolution and take it from there.
So far my involvement in this has been a sort of backseat, just responding to what Bruce has brought forward and also to Rosemary, who thankfully we’ve managed to find reach thanks to Cheryl having done the impossible. But I think we’ll probably have to take a bigger lead in this whilst at the same time not try to do more than what we’re really supposed to do.
Heidi, your hand is up?
Heidi Ullrich: For this, so what I’m hearing is that there is interest in holding an ALAC meeting or ALAC-led meeting on the consumer issue. Is this something that you would like to have perhaps be put into that hot topics slot, or would you like another full hour meeting on this topic?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well, the question is geared at me. I’m just a bit concerned that if we start having a meeting just on this issue we’re going to also double the purpose of the Consumer Constituency, which Beau has headed with-
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, actually you’re right, and I believe that’s at the same time.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yeah, be careful not to duplicate it. Maybe that will fill up enough of the consumer base in SFO, remembering that there’s an awful lot of fragile egos involved in some of this consumer world as well. We’re just trying to encourage Beau and some of the others to mend bridges that have been unnecessarily damaged in the past, So we’ll encourage that to happen in SFO.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I’m sure Beau and Alex Gakuru have some plans, so perhaps should we ask them what they’re going to do?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: And we can ask Rosemary what NCSG is already planning.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay. So let’s take this as an action item: ask Rosemary, Alex and Beau as to what their plans are, what the next steps are on this. And then we can probably email to discuss this among ourselves, so as to be able to find a solution or an action item on this. Is that okay with everyone?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, Olivier, I believe though that the half-day workshops that the Consumer Constituency is planning actually overlaps with both of our Tuesday ALAC policy sessions, which is not good timing. But I can follow up with him on that.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Okay, well there you go.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Certainly we have to move away from working in silos, and if it means that we’re going to have our workshop on consumer issues in one silo and the NCUC and CSG in another silo – that’s just not really positive in my book.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yes, we can’t do that. We’ve got to get beyond that.
Heidi Ullrich: What we could possibly do is invite them, since their session is going to be at the same time we could invite them to come to our meeting. Let’s see, I think it was Tuesday, 10:00 to 10:30. We could invite them to come and just talk to us a little bit about what they’ve been discussing. Would that be an option?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: (inaudible) Constituency Day in the GNSO world, that’s the natural place for new constituencies, new and old constituencies within the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group to be interacting and everything else. So anything that fits us better in with that level as opposed to makes us look like we stand apart from that model-
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, okay.
Evan Leibovitch: Actually, truth be told you define a consumer as being an end user, then they’re the ones redundant with us. And I’ll be blunt about this – I’m tired of it.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: There are some of us that are tired with all sorts of things. We’ve got to look at the end game here, which is a better deal-
Evan Leibovitch: The end game is we’re not accomplishing anything by spinning all these wheels. That’s what’s happening. How many consumer meetings has ICANN hosted already and how much policy has come out of it? All the talk has been about mechanics and structures and constituencies, and nobody has a bleeping clue about what initiatives and policy they’re actually going to sit down and do once they get their seat at the table.
Forgive me, but I’ve seen enough of these and attended enough of those meetings and I totally wasted my time at them, if I must be blunt, in terms of actual policy coming out of it. We have the risk of going to another meeting that has another consumer meeting that deals wholly with structure and not a shred of policy to come out of it. From the agendas I’ve seen-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Evan, thank you.
Evan Leibovitch: I’ll leave it at that. I’m frustrated by it.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Cheryl?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Well, those of you who worked from pre-trans on to try and get some models for the new GNSO that was better than the old one, are probably even at a higher level of frustration, Evan. But you know, we just have to hasten slowly and keeping dripping water on the rock – eventually, hopefully it will be remodeled in a satisfactory way.
Evan Leibovitch: Is there something At-Large can do to fill that vacuum?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Not unless it encourages parts of its component parts to go and be involved in that space, which is what we are doing with things like trying to build a Consumer Constituency because it’s an ALAC agency and this is (crosstalk).
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, I think we’ve pretty much beaten that subject to death if it hasn’t killed us already.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I’ll tell you what – suicide’s looking very positive from my perspective right now.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: We’re way over time and there’s just a couple more subjects before we can all go and get on with our real lives. And the next item on the agenda is the review and revised timeline on the policy advice development calendar. And there, as I understand, seem to be three policies for possible discussion: one being the GNSO Working Group guidelines, one being the proposed process for recognition of new GNSO constituencies, and one being the interim report of the Internationalized Registration Data Working Group.
And I’ll be very frank – I have not read any of the three current proposals, so I wonder if anyone else has and whether anyone has a comment to make on this. Do we need to provide input on these three? The floor is open.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: My suggestion would be yes, yes, and yes. And in terms of Internationalized Registration Data, that’s something that we have been involved with. It’s not going to take a lot but we certainly have with internationalized domain names also called for registration data to be equally multi-scripted and internationalized.
It seems beyond bizarre and it is in fact a considerable risk to end users from a certain security point of view if the language and scripting that their domain names are in is not matched with registration data and backend information that could in fact be being used to sort out and/or other things, in a language that’s easily understood. I mean to me they’re all no-brainers, but…
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: So I see that the Internationalized Registration Data Working Group, is this actually being followed by some members in APRALO?
Cheryl Lagndon-Orr: Well, quite probably. It’s not a formalized Working Group but-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Did I hear Heidi?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes. My understanding from Steve Sheng, who is the staff support for this, is that Edmund is I believe the Chair or a key member in that group. So what we’re-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yes, but when it came to GNSO work he was very [break in audio].
Heidi Ullrich: Okay, so what we’re planning- Not only is there going to be two webinars on the IRD report but we’re also planning an At-Large call this next week at an Asian-friendly time where Steve will be presenting, and we’re hoping that Edmund and James will also be on that call.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Alright, that’s what I thought I had heard.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: It’s certainly something that our part of the world would think we should have an ALAC input into, yes.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, let’s make it so then. And if we can have it as an action item to perhaps ask… Is it possible to have Edmund lead this?
Heidi Ullrich: I think that it might be James because Edmund felt that he was too closely associated, but let me follow up again.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Oh, okay. Please, Heidi, yeah. GNSO Working Group guidelines? Any comment on this specifically? I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to read through it, and my internet connection being slow the page doesn’t open at the moment.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Well, we’ve been an integral part of developing them. We’ve had members of the ALAC involved in each of the Work Teams that has developed them. Even if it’s lip service we need to say something. I would suggest that that again is something that you know, we should respond to-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Now only one problem, that it closed on the 8th of February and we’re the 9th today.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Well there you go. Typically (crosstalk).
Heidi Ullrich: But okay, I can contact Marika on that. I think that that would be okay.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Please, Heidi, if we can be given another week to draft something that can go in this.
Heidi Ullrich: Okay. Would Alex be someone who could draft t hat?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I think that would be a good idea. I’m afraid I’m not well, knowledgeable enough myself on this so I don’t want to comment and say something really stupid. And Cheryl has dropped again, I’m afraid. But yeah, let’s involve Alan on this because I think it’s definitely important for us to be able to comment even if we are late. I guess we have a few more days until staff starts writing, putting something together.
Quickly moving back, the third one being the proposed process for recognition of new GNSO constituencies, and I reckon this also would involve Alan on this, him being the GNSO liaison. Any comment from anyone left here? And I guess it’s only Tijani and Evan since Carlton has left at half past the hour.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Olivier-
Evan Leibovitch: The only thing, I mean if you want to talk in generalities about-
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Evan, sorry, Tijani was first. Sorry.
Evan Leibovitch: Oh, sorry.
Olivier Crepi-Leblond: Tijani?
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Yes, can you hear me now?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Yes, we hear you. Yes please.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: I tried to speak a lot of times but nobody answers if you heard me. Okay, so concerning the GNSO, okay. Now if the deadline can be extended it should be okay.
For the, I think that for the Internationalized Registration Data it’s very important to comment, and we do have to give our comments.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, I think we’re all in agreement with this. That’s good. And so did the third one about the GNSO as well, proposed process for recognition of new GNSO constituencies?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Well duh.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay, Evan.
Evan Leibovitch: I was speaking in generalities. I don’t know how comprehensive this thing is, but I mean one of the things- Is Seth still on the call?
Seth Greene: Yes, hi Evan.
Evan Leibovitch: Hi there. You remember when Samantha proposed- ICANN Legal staff actually proposed in a redline an additional note to the bylaw change being proposed on behalf of At-Large that gives explicit recognition of At-Large’s role in policy development. And this now is going to be explicit and in the bylaws.
There’s part of me that would almost like to see something, some comment go in although heaven knows I don’t have the time for it myself. But the idea of making sure that there’s a comment that as they refine the policy development process that they’ve got to recognize that they’ve got to invite outsiders coming in to be involved in the process. If they have folks like At-Large coming in at the beginning of the policy development process, they don’t have to come in and do so much damage control afterwards, as has happened for instance on Rec 6.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: A very fair point, Evan.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Evan, that is exactly what the new guidelines do. That is exactly why we should be saying they’re a good thing. And the debate for example now in the what’s left of the Policy Development Work Group guideline’s asking how formally input from the ACs are going to be taken at the end parts of the game as well as being integrated into the open Work Group model as well. That’s exactly why we’ve worked so hard to get these things where they are.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay. Well, that’s a good thing to hear and Cheryl, may I ask you to follow up on this? Is that okay?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: No you can’t.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Hello?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: No, you may not.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: (crosstalk) …ask you?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Again, as a Work Team that’s written the report it’s not really appropriate to write the response.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Ah, okay.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: So the three people you can’t ask are Vanda, Alan, and Cheryl. Why? Because Vanda, Alan and Cheryl have been absolutely integral in writing the guidelines and fighting for these guidelines and keeping these guidelines up.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: So these are the three people I can’t ask.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Correct.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Hmm. Well I’ll work something out. I don’t have the names at the top of my head at the moment, I’m too (inaudible). But action item for me, I guess, to find a solution to this ASAP.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: It can be motherhood-ish. Just have a quick look at the executive summary, have a talk with them, but you know, I think you’ll find it’s just not overly challenging. It just needs to be done.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Okay. We’re reaching the end of this call, and we now have any other business.
Heidi Ullrich: Can I raise my hand?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Is that Heidi?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Yes, Heidi. I don’t have a list of the AOB but I know that you do, so I’ll leave you to be able to speak to us about this please.
Heidi Ullrich: Thank you. Well, I have to make a staff announcement and it’s with very mixed emotions that I say this, that Matthias has tendered his resignation effective immediately after the San Francisco meeting. He actually has been nicked by [Mick Astonheart]. He is going to be going over to Google. They’re going to be working together in Geneva.
So what does that mean for us? David and I have been working very closely, and David’s made great strides on getting this position posted. It’s actually already posted. In the interim, what the plans are, the hope is that we’re going to have Seth come on and take over three of the regions. Those regions would be APRALO, NARALO, and LACRALO. We will also then have Gisella step in to help with AFRALO and EURALO. Now this is only through the end of August when I will be coming back from maternity leave, and we hopefully will have a permanent person in that position at that time.
And we will be training Seth and Gisella starting almost immediately but most intensively during the San Francisco meeting as well as then following through mid-April. Matthias will make himself available for training through mid-April. In addition, we are currently looking for the At-Large Coordinator position, which again we’re hoping to have in place by mid-April so Matthias will be able to train that person as well.
Any comments?
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Yes, I have one.
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, Tijani.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: I am, too, sad. Really, really, because Matthias, nobody will replace him. He’s an exceptional person. I am too sorry to see him leaving, but we really now need personnel, other persons. Because you will be on vacation for your baby and it will be a big problem for At-Large and ALAC.
Heidi Ullrich: Yeah, so we are, I mean I am very aware of that and that’s my number one priority, is to ensure stability and continuity in giving all the support that you’re used to. So David again, I can assure you he’s working very hard to make this be the case. We’re going to be shifting some staff people around a little bit to help with that. I know that Seth is going to, Seth will be covering the ALAC and the ExCom in the period that I’m gone. Cheryl, you may laugh but my hope is that after the first month that I will be able to at least monitor my emails for a couple of hours a day. I don’t know. But also David will be able to, he’ll be there to step in if need be as well.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: And Cheryl, you have your hand up.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yes, I do. Look, Matthias is a bright young thing and it was inevitable that he would be pursuing whatever opportunities come his way during this point in his career, and I would like to make sure that we do not only recognize how valuable he’s been in the very early days through to now; but also that we do have a formal vote of thanks and wishing him well. His previous incarnation of course was within the world of the IGS, so he has stayed in a rather similar area of interest. And it may be in the force of time that he might come back in another role.
So I think it’s really important that we appreciate what he’s done and we wish him all the very best in the next steps in his career. But we also need to make sure, Olivier, that unlike last time we had staff changes, that the already existing budget to pay someone to do this job does not get somehow sucked into some form of black hole; and that we do get the appropriate support and replacement promptly.
And I did note reading again the recent release on the approved budget, the FY11 budget, that didn’t interrupt us at all. It served to increase support for ALAC and At-Large when in fact what is being offered is a return to previous levels of support for ALAC and At-Large in terms of staff. And you need to be pretty damned aggressive about that, that Heidi does get the number of FTE equipment that she needs to run the support that the community desires.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: I hear you, Cheryl, and I think Heidi also does, and Heidi, you might wish to add something?
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, just a thank you, Cheryl; very valid point. But just to note that there are currently three policy positions posted which have gone at least for the Coordinator, well at least for the regional manager’s position in an amazing shortness of time for that to be posted. But those three positions are again Matthias’ position, so the regional manage for outreach for At-Large; the At-Large Coordinator, which as Cheryl mentioned, took nearly over a year actually to post; and we also currently have a Policy Director position as well.
So that policy position, as I understand it, is going to be partially an umbrella sort of position to where that person might also come in and help with At-Large support. But as we select the best candidates for all of those positions that will be determined. But that is certainly my hope, that that will be a senior position that will at least allow me to provide more support, policy development support to you while this other person can help with other aspects of At-Large support.
So if you could-
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: (crosstalk) …umbrella out inclusive of us, I think. That’s good.
Heidi Ullrich: Yes, yes. So that’s my hope, so in the interim we’re very much hoping that there’s not an interruption to our 24/7 support, and we’re going to do everything to actually improve that in the future.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well, thank you very much, Heidi, and I appreciate that Seth and Gisella will be stepping in to try and provide that support. And I wish them good luck in advance before the tidal wave comes and takes them, anyway. But yes, certainly a lot of changes and certainly also a concern as far as I’m concerned. So we will be pushing and we need to push hard for these positions to be filled as soon as possible with very competent people. We’ve already got a competent team and now we have a competent person leaving us, so we need a very competent person coming back as well. It will be hard to fill Matthias’ shoes.
I echo Tijani’s sadness to see him go because I thought Matthias is a real nice guy on top of being competent; and he certainly has also worked overtime, just as many of us do here. At the same time I’m happy for him. He is joining a world-class company and it certainly is a great thing to be able to move from one organization to another one without, well, just moving up as a standard career path. So certainly we’ll wish Matthias all the best and we’ll have I’m sure certainly more chances in the future to speak to him especially in San Francisco.
And Evan has very kindly reminded me that we’re working overtime right now, and I totally agree with him. I’ve had my fair share of ALAC work today and I’m sure you’ve all had, you’re probably all waiting for me to adjourn this meeting. Any other announcements or any other business in addition to the other business that we’ve just had?
And I see no hands going up at the moment. Heidi?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Did you actually decide to put in comments to the new GNSO constituency or not?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Yes.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Oh we did, okay. I just didn’t hear that part; maybe it was during one of my many drop-offs. That’s all.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well I’ve said yes, we’re going ahead with it. The consensus is that we should and we definitely will. How? I’m not sure yet but we will. Tijani, your hand is up. You might be muted, Tijani. You might still be muted.
Heidi Ullrich: *7 to unmute.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Do you hear me now?
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Ah, yes we can now.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Okay, so can we agree on doing something for Matthias in San Francisco?
Heidi Ullrich: Lovely idea.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Something for an adieu.
Heidi Ullrich: That’s a lovely idea. We can arrange something.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: Yeah.
Heidi Ullrich: If again- Sorry, sorry. If the ALAC agrees we can do something.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Even if ALAC doesn’t agree I think some of us should do something, but I’m sure ALAC till agree.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: If ALAC doesn’t agree I will do this with those who want to do.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Well I’m not sure if this is such a controversial subject, Tijani.
Tijani Ben Jemaa: I don’t know.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Should I submit this to a vote or do we just adjourn and say yes? Sorry, say yes and then adjourn? I think we’re all happy with that, Tijani. Yes, a very good point and I’m sure we will.
So with all that and looking at seeing no one else having any comments, I think it’s time to adjourn this meeting. Thank you very much. Time is 20:07 UTC, we are one hour behind schedule. And it’s been a very long meeting, so thanks for bearing with us Tijani, Evan, Cheryl, Carlton until about half an hour ago, and of course Heidi and Seth.
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