[ga] To: ga@dnso.org

["Joe Sims" <jsims@JonesDay.com>]

Danny Younger wrote the following:

                                                                                          
 The ICANN Board held a meeting.  Whether you label it a "retreat" or                     
 something else, it was still a meeting of the Board to discuss ICANN matters.            
  The Internet community was promised that Board meetings would honor the                 
 principles of openness and transparency, and that minutes of such meetings               
 would be provided.                                                                       
                                                                                          
 Would anyone care to predict whether such minutes will ever be forthcoming?              
                                                                                          
                                                                                          


While I understand that this is hardly a new subject, I thought it might be
useful, given the large number of apparently new participants in the GA
list drawn by its recent electoral efforts, to take one more crack at the
difference between transparency and "everything in public."  Danny, like
some others, apparently believe that to be transparent, all ICANN
discussion and actions have to be taken in full public view.  Why this is
so is not intuitively obvious.  Transparency to me means that  all actions
taken are disclosed and explained on the public record, for all to see and
react to, not that they can only be done in a stadium or on a webcast.  I
can understand Danny's curiosity, especially since for whatever reason he
and some others appear to have virtually unlimited interest and time to
spend on ICANN's lists and other related apparatus, but the fact that they
would like to listen in to every conversation does not rise to the level of
a condition precedent to openness.  Under this view of the world, there can
be no private discussions, because someone might say something that could
be influential and it would not be heard by the world.  This is the kind of
mentality that led to so-called "sunshine" laws in the US, which then led
to the affected bodies developing complicated ways to have the private
conversations that the "sunshine" laws supposedly prevent.  You'll notice
that no one pays much attention to this issue in the real world anymore.
No federal agency I am aware of conducts all its substantive discussions in
public, for all the obvious reasons.   And it is not mere coincidence that
the very Congress that passed "sunshine" laws did not apply them to itself.
The fact is that ICANN publishes every action taken, every proposed action
taken, and a lot of other stuff that never leads to actions taken.  The
notion that it is not "transparent" because it does not mandate that every
discussion, whether intended to produce an action or not, be held in full
public view is just plain silly.

The Board held a retreat this weekend.  It made no decisions (and therefore
there will be no minutes), but it did have several hours over two days of
uninterrupted discussion about very complicated topics.  I hope and believe
that the Board members left the retreat with a better understanding of the
issues, and their complexities, and of the perspectives of their fellow
Board members, than they had before the retreat.  Certainly, the Evolution
and Reform Committee members have a deeper understanding of the
perspectives of their colleagues to the materials they and others have
produced over the last several months, and this will be helpful in the
Committee's production of recommendations to the Board and the community,
which hopefully will be published later this week.   In most contexts, this
would be considered a good thing -- the people charged with oversight of an
body and a process working together to gain a better collective
understanding of the issues, so that they can do their job better.  In
Danny's world, on the other hand, it is just one more meeting of the Black
Helicopters.  Sad.


Joe Sims




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