[council] Proposed NC Procedure from Berkman Center

["Ben Edelman" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>]

Members of the Names Council,

The students working at the Berkman Center on proposed procedures for Names
Council Meetings asked me to forward the following text to you:

"Thank you for inviting us to participate and contribute in your efforts to
come up with a workable Domain Name System.  We hope to facilitate the
objectives of the Names Council, namely, advising the ICANN Board with
respect to policy issues relating to the Domain Name System.  We have
therefore provided a set of procedural rules that the Names Council can
adhere to when formulating consensus recommendations.  Enclosed are our
suggestions for the Names Council meeting procedures, as well as our
conception of how the Names Council formulates recommendations and presents
them to the ICANN board.  While the rest of this package will explain in
detail the procedures we suggest and why we urge their adoption, this brief
letter will attempt to highlight some of the themes and policies that
underlie our choices and motivate our reasoning.  We hope you find these
comments and procedures to be helpful as you tackle the DNS issues ahead."

They've prepared a detailed set of documents proposing specific methods of
conducting Names Council meetings; rather than send you the surprisingly
large Word documents and PowerPoint presentations as attachments, I've
posted them online at
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/dnso/ncprocedure/>.

When you make comments, as I'm sure you will since these documents remain a
work in progress, I suggest that you cc the following list (me, Jonathan
Zittrain, Andrew McLaughlin, and the specific students involved:
edelman@law.harvard.edu, zittrain@law.harvard.edu, mclaughlin@pobox.com,
acoppedg@law.harvard.edu alim@law.harvard.edu, hvandert@law.harvard.edu;
sfatima@law.harvard.edu.



Ben Edelman
Berkman Center