RE: [wg-d] Freezing WG Membership

["Antony Van Couvering" <avc@interport.net>]

Agreed

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-wg-d@dnso.org [mailto:owner-wg-d@dnso.org]On Behalf Of Bret
> A. Fausett
> Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 12:44 PM
> To: wg-d@dnso.org
> Subject: [wg-d] Freezing WG Membership
>
>
> >From my participation with WG-C, I noted that the group often became
> side-tracked by the fact that new members were joining throughout
> its work.
> It was a distraction, an annoyance, and may have kept the group from
> becoming more cohesive than it might otherwise have been. (I thought it
> worked very well, actually, given its tasks and history.)
>
> Open membership in WG-C was important for that particular group, coming as
> it did early in the life of ICANN. Last year, it was quite possible that
> someone might have been interested in the creation of new TLDs
> but ignorant
> about ICANN. I doubt that is the case any longer. We might now want to
> consider freezing the membership of a WG at some defined moment in time.
>
> The primary purpose would be to create cohesiveness, build community, and
> encourage compromise. With a changing membership, compromise
> reached one day
> can be attacked the next by a new member not privy to the long
> conversations
> and debates that went into it.
>
> Something like a firm 60 day enrollment window at a working group's launch
> would also serve to partially protect WG votes from being stacked.
>
> On the negative side, such a rule might give a false sense of
> consensus, by
> pushing criticism to the end (in the public comment phase).
>
> Any thoughts on this?
>
>         -- Bret
>
>