[wg-review] Conclusions
Having twice listened to the audiocast of the recent Names Council
meeting, I cannot concur with our Chair’s assessment that the Names Council has
“asked
us to continue”; neither can I agree with the statement that the Names Council is
“taking us seriously”. We have
only been given the opportunity to avail ourselves of the Public Comment Period
(January 26 – February 9) subsequent to the posting of the DNSO Review Report on
the DNSO website. The consensus position articulated by
Ken Stubbs was that the WG Review mandate, per prior resolutions, ends on
January 15. The Names
Council has decided that they are sufficiently satisfied with our “outreach” and
that the WG Review need not work to “find solutions”; they will, over the
objections of our liaison, Ms. Park, publish their self-serving Interim DNSO Review
report. Ms. Park has
already challenged the conclusions of the Interim Draft, strenuously objecting
to what she has termed the “absurd” posting of this report, repeatedly citing a
failure on the part of the Names Council Review Task Force to abide by any procedures,
stating, “it doesn’t follow any rules”; she has further asserted that the NCRTF
failed to collaborate with its members, failed to hold either an open forum or
a teleconference, and that this report should be labeled solely as the
work-product of Ms. Swinehart, and “should not be recognized”. I want to thank Ms. Park for having had the courage of her
convictions and the tenacity to fight for the interests of the Review Working
Group. At issue now is how to best
deal with the perniciousness of the Names Council. As Roeland Meyer has stated, “Those of us who have been involved from
the early stages are very well aware of the possibility of nullification, of
our work. Those of us, whom have read the archives, know that this has happened
in the past, frequently.” What we will have in the DNSO document will be nothing less than a whitewash, a pathetic self-assessment on the part of a middle management more interested in preserving their jobs than doing their jobs… an evaluation from a Names Council who after several months of time and several purported discussions is still unable to even pass the most basic of budget proposals, who holds meetings of limited duration and fails to address even half of the items on its own agenda, who cannot substantially complete a Task Force report even after six months of alleged effort, and who has on the basis of their own initiatives secured no more than a handful of responses to their own questionnaire (with all the highly critical comments buried in the Appendix). As members of this Working Group, some of us have expressed the need to eliminate the Names Council and the Constituency structure; others have pressed for the establishment of alternate Constituencies in order to secure representation and add new blood to an organization clearly in need of a transfusion. What we have in common is a shared sentiment that the current poorly performing “Management Team” of the DNSO needs to be replaced. If in this Comment Period we can effectively present the consensus
to the public and to the ICANN Board that the current members of the Names
Council have failed in their duty to act as a steering committee for the DNSO, have
failed to manage consensus, and have failed to make well-considered
recommendations, perhaps the Constituencies themselves will listen and order
new elections to replace these members with others more suited for the responsibilities. I continue to have faith in the bottoms-up procedure; I also believe
that the Constituencies too have already acknowledged this problem, share our assessment,
and will act, if prompted, to resolve this issue. The audio
archive of the January
24, 2001 meeting of the DNSO's Names Council may be found at http://www.lextext.com/nc0124.html . Listen, and draw your own conclusions. Best regards, Danny Younger |