RE: [wg-d] Freezing WG Membership

["Timothy Denton" <tmdenton@magma.ca>]

Brett and Others:

I am not prepared to establish a rule that all working groups should be
either open or closed after a certain date, and would prefer a rule that
allows for closed groups exceptionally when the circumstances warrant. These
would include: a) tight deadlines and
		b) a narrow, technical mandate

It occurs to me that certain groups, such as WG-D, could have tight well
defined mandates and be better off with a closed structure after a certain
period.
On the other hand, much of this may be rearranging deck chairs on the
Titanic.
Having seen what the Names Council did with WG-C's 6-10 recommendation, it
is clear that Working Groups do not really matter as regards fundamental
questions. Perhaps this is inevitable, but it is unfortunate. It would
appear from the decisions of the Names Council that the IP constituency will
roll over everyone in each new forum, to the extent they can or that they
are allowed to.

Keeping a group that concerns itself with the large issues open during the
course of its mandate would seem to me effective at preventing a closed and
partial list, and to allow for people to get interested as the issue heats
up.

I do not see that stipulating a  period after which membership is closed
will solve, alleviate, aggravate, or cause a stacking problem by itself.The
real concern is that working groups matter for little in the councils of the
great.
Timothy Denton, BA, BCL
tmdenton.com
Telecom and Internet Law and Policy
37 Heney Street, Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada, K1N 5V6
phone: 1-613-789-5397
tmdenton@magma.ca
fax: 789-5398
www.tmdenton.com



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-wg-d@dnso.org [mailto:owner-wg-d@dnso.org]On Behalf Of
Antony Van Couvering
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 2:13 PM
To: Bret A. Fausett; wg-d@dnso.org
Subject: RE: [wg-d] Freezing WG Membership


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
>
>

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