Re: [wg-c-1] Preliminaries

[Jonathan Weinberg <weinberg@mail.msen.com>]

	Kevin's suggestions sound good to me.  FWIW, in 1997-98 I was working for
the US government as it attempted to develop its own DNS policy.  I ended
up being the reporter for the interagency committee given that job, and we
came up with, I thought, a pretty good document.  (Ira then decided that
the document should be rewritten from scratch, and the result of his
process -- the Green Paper -- was different in a bunch of respects from
ours.  But that's another story.)  My immediate point is that the system
Kevin describes usually does work.

Jon


Jon Weinberg
Professor of Law, Wayne State University
weinberg@msen.com



At 01:54 PM 7/9/99 -0400, Kevin J. Connolly wrote:
>Dear readers:
>
>Someone has to break the ice, so it might as well be I.  I have some
little experience in the preparation of documents by committee, both online
and face-to-face, and I will share some thoughts on the process.
>
>First suggestion:  Since we are charged with answering several questions
which have been framed for us, I suggest that we establish threads which
are devoted to each of those questions.  This is not to say that posts on
other threads are forbidden, but rather to suggest that the actual drafting
work of the group be conducted in these specific threads.  Let's agree that
we'll try really hard to keep posts in the "Work: xx" threads on topic,
okay? :-)
>
>Second suggestion:  I have found it useful in the past to adopt the
"reporter" model for moving discussion toward consensus and reducing that
consensus to a written form.  This is the model that is used by the
American Law Institute to produce the Restatements of [American] Law.  It
is used by the Board of Justices of the Supreme Court of the State of New
York to produce the Pattern Jury Instructions.  It was used by the CORE ad
hoc committee to produce CORE's RFP for the development and maintenance of
its shared registration system.  It was used by the Policy Advisory Body to
develop its response to the Green Paper.  It's not perfect, but it can work.
>
>Under this model, once we have parsed our work into manageable pieces (see
below), one person is selected (drafted/shanghaied/volunteered) to act as
the Reporter.  The Reporter's job is to weave the differing
arguments/positions/statements of the WG members into a document.  The
document covers both areas of consensus and areas of disagreement.  It is
posted (either to the list or to a website) for comments.  As comments are
received, if consensus develops, that outcome is worked into the document.
 As new disagreements develop, they, too, are reflected in the document.
>
>Eventually, it may become necessary for us to decide on a means for
finding "rough consensus" even in the presence of disagreement.  Whether
this takes the form of a votebot or the submission of a minority report on
one or more issues need not be decided now.  Once our discussions begin in
earnest, it will quickly become evident whether or not we're going to find
that kind of consensus.
>
>Finally, in the interest of keeping the process manageable (and because
the answers to the rest of the questions depend on this first question) I
suggest that we turn our attention, in the first instance, to the threshold
question of whether there should be new gtlds at all.
>
>Thanks for reading; as usual, please disregard that silly confidentiality
trailer, which is an artifact of this mail client and my IT department's
generally 404 character.
>
>Kevin J. Connolly
>
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