Re: [Ianaplan] Off topic: public comments

[Alan Greenberg <[e-mail]>]

At 10/08/2015 12:04 PM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:


>On 10/08/2015 16:55, John C Klensin wrote:
> > While that description is certainly consistent with my
> > observations, it suggests something interesting and problematic
> > that is the other side of the "anyone can comment" problem.
> > That is that there are "people who matter" and people who don't.
> > It isn't clear who makes that decision and on what basis
> > although I hope it is ICG.  In the ICANN case, the answer has
> > traditionally been staff with the criteria apparently closely
> > related to either "opinions that agree with what they would
> > like" or "domain name sales interests".
>
>This *might* have been the case in the past and has been criticised from
>within the ICANN community. One way to remedy any staff bias in the
>summarising of public comments has been to publish the summarised
>material that was made available to the ICANN Board.
>
>However, on this occasion, we are dealing with a working group that's
>doing the consultation. ICANN Working Group Consultations have improved
>a lot in recent years. Of the several ICANN working groups issuing
>public consultations in the past 2-3 years that I was a member of, I
>have noticed a best practice in place for ICANN Staff to limit their
>summarising to batching comments (grouping them together) on a per
>topic/issue basis into a table. The working group then set itself a duty
>to go through each and every comment in turn, taking the comment into
>consideration and working out a response. This takes place on conference
>calls, is tedious and very time consuming especially for volunteers like
>me who do not get paid for doing this, but it also shows respect for the
>comment that was made and involves a degree of transparency that shows
>the working group is not just dismissing comments lightly.
>On many occasions, there have been comments made that I completely
>agreed with but others on the conference call disagreed with. It then
>comes down to the convincing arguments made in the comment. There are
>times when we did not reach consensus in which case the status quo remained.
>
>I really hope the ICG will follow this process, so we can see how they
>treat each and every comment made.
>
>Kindest regards,
>
>Olivier

I tend to agree with Olivier. The process in ICANN has changed 
markedly in the last several years. We even saw a Board intent to 
change a Bylaw scuttled by community comment and I have seen WGs 
rethink things that they had consciously discussed and decided upon 
in light of comments which presented a new twist to the issue.

Operating in a fishbowl does not make it easy to reject/ignore the 
comments that (in the view of some) are clearly out of scope or 
completely off-target, but what choice do we have.

Alan